Redlining
Redlining is the name given the systemic practice of identifying neighborhoods marked by a high density of minority population with economic risk and devaluation. Entire sections of a city would be deemed at risk for lenders and creditors on the basis of nothing but the predominance of darkly pigmented skin over lightly pigmented. Redlining has become a shameful symbol of the concerted effort by conspiracy city planners to create and maintain racial segregation through economic power rather than forceful coercion.
Cotton
The word “cotton” appears in the text almost as often as the word “slavery.” And, indeed, it is impossible to extricate cotton from slavery, they are forever bound together. The textile crop did not become known as “King Cotton” because it was only worn by royalty. Cotton in the 19th century is often compared to oil in the 20th and the comparison is appropriate as both are the iconic symbols of fuel driving the engine of global economic domination by the U.S. Without cotton, it is entirely possible—not likely but possible—slavery would have been abolished long before the need for a civil war.
“White Gold”
It was not cotton, but another product entirely that earns a unique symbolic nickname in the long, sordid history of the African slave trade. Cotton growers would need to wait until Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in the 1790s for their crop to become truly profitable and even then plantations remained subject to the inevitable devastation to the fertility of their soil raising cotton brought. By the time Whitney filed his patent for the gin, one of every two ships sailing into or out of New York Harbor was loaded with sugar, the true “white gold” of the slave economy.
Antoine
A slave known to history only by the name Antoine is the perfect symbol of the full breadth of slavery’s exploitation. That workers were exploited for their labor without recompense goes without saying, but the exploitation is shared equally by those who never even saw a slave, much less owned them. A plantation owner assigned the job of making pecans an economically feasible crop by standardizing their profit-reducing natural tendency to grow in non-standardized sizes. The result was transforming the pecan into “America’s nut” as well as fostering an element as closely identified with genteel white southern culture as lounging on the veranda sipping cool iced tea in white linen suits.
Nat King Cole
Somewhat similar to Antoine, but at least able to lend three names to history is Nat King Cole. Before the advent of television, Nat King Cole, was an enormously popular recording star on the radio, singing the number one ranked song of 1950, “Mona Lisa.” Despite this popularity, when he became one of the first black entertainers to host a network TV show, the failure to find a single nationally recognized company to sponsor the show led to its premature cancellation. Cole’s experience would become a symbol of the impact that advertising had on the careers on black entertainers. Advertising became an industry operating for decades on what would prove to be a woefully misguided principle that doubtlessly cost companies millions: white people don’t mind being entertained by black people but they don’t buy products used (or even pretended to be used) by them.
