Wealth as Domination, The Stewardship of Wealth in Black and White

By Norman Franklin

Norman Franklin

In the beginning Euro peans came to these Native lands to colonize the new world. Their hope was to create a colony free from dominance by the Crown and the Church of England. Their religious idealism and economic ambitions interlaced the vision. The early settlers were called Pilgrims and Puritans.

John Winthrop, Puri tan preacher, and first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony delivered his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” on board the Arbella. That was 1630. The first Africans arrived in the colonies in 1619. He didn’t live what he preached; he didn’t look into the mirror of God’s word to see his own reflection. Records indicate that by 1631, Winthrop owned enslaved Africans.

“We shall be as a city upon a hill.’’ The Puri tans believed their new society should serve as a model for godly living. It expressed a sense of divine purpose and destiny, chosen by God to demonstrate how a true Christian common wealth should function. The Southern Baptist Convention continues to labor beneath the shadow of that aberrant Christian identity first forged in the Puritan imagination; the eco nomic ethics of America are interwoven with that idealism.

A mention of the classic short story, “The Devil and Daniel Webster” written by Stephen Vincent Benet, to illustrate the danger of bar gaining divine purpose for material prosperity, offers a moral lesson divine purpose and des tiny need not be supplemented by man’s machi nations. And in the case of chattel slavery, it makes God a liar. He is not partial and does not favor one ethnicity over another Africans were not born for servitude.

The colonists’ purist intentions were contaminated, begrimed, adulterated by the intro duction of enslavement for personal gain, the devaluing of humans of the Imago Dei, and the self-deception that it was right in the eyes of their God. This is the origin of wealth as domination that moral and spiritual compromise became insti tutionalized through slavery. This ethic underpins Christian teachings on equality, justice, and human rights.

The chattel slave sys tem, which began in 1619, evolved to become the economic foundation of the colonies. The American wealth system was built on theological self-deception, where dominance displaced stewardship. This is the genesis of the wealth dominance culture of our governance, our economy, our society and our religiosity.

The wealth centric economic model soon became the standard, greed derailed their purist visions, and set the tone and direction of the nascent world power godly pur pose became economic power. Both economic systems-the industrial North and the plantation South-shared the same moral rot of wealth dominance.

An internal power struggle gripped the nation the free labor of enslaved Africans was the smoldering embers that ignited our bloodi est, and most destruc tive war. The plantation aristocracy: the Antebel lum South used enslaved people as capital and for political dominance. The industrial North was complicit, hoarding wealth via banking and shipping cotton was the backbone of the economy. By 1860, cot ton accounted for 60% of America’s exports.

A war of economic envy and wealth dominance was inevitable. The Southern economic empire was built on free, forced labor without the labor cost factor, the Plantation wealth model maximized profits. The Northern labor-intensive industrial economy depended on Southern cotton and international markets. The Southern secession threatened the industrial North’s financial structure. The Civil War was a conflict for wealth dominance a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight. This dynamic shed light on an enduring pattern, the concentration of wealth as justification of human exploitation.

The wealthy planta tion aristocracy paid substitutes to avoid Confederate service on the battlefields, in the North, similar loopholes allowed draft exemp tions. It’s an avoid ance tactic that is still employed in our mod ern-day wars. During the Vietnam Conflict, men avoided deployment to Southeast Asia with education deferments, medical deferments such as bone spurs, or enlistment in their State National Guard.

History records the mesmerizing power of propaganda. The North framed the war as a crusade to preserve the union; freedom of the enslaved was later tacked on for the moral cause. For the South, it was a fight for honor, tradition, and self determination. Both narratives masked their economic motives, mobilized the ordinary - the expendable citizens in a fight for moral grandeur while wealth and power consolidated behind the scenes, behind the blood-soaked battlefields. America’s first great war for freedom was also its first great reckoning with greed.

The North and the South were systems of exploitation; both were forms of capitalism with the same endgame: profit justifies human suffering when it bene fits the few, the wealthy. The system of wealth dominance continued to be the standard through the decades after the war of economics ended but now the lost assets of emancipation must be reckoned. The Reconstruction Era was an attempt to fulfill the moral cause of the war, recognize the humanity of the former enslaved, and allow them to explore their intellectual capacity demonstrate their abilities to work with their minds.

To win the election of 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes handed over the fate of the freed Blacks to the merciless culture of plantation economics: he needed their 20 electoral votes. Stewardship was sacrificed for political expediency and economic dominance. Reconstruction ended, the Black Codes began Jim Crow Laws, domestic terrorism, mob lynchings, and segregation, returned Blacks to the lowest rung of the social hierarchy. Share cropping, prison laborers, the peonage system, were the rails the free men rode backward into economic slavery.

The North feigned efforts to assimilate the new Black citizens into their society. The longstanding attitude of equality prevailed selective freedom, condition al equality, never equal to whites. Poor housing, ghettos, unfair labor practices, and redlining loan practices relegated African Americans to poverty prone zip codes economic deserts, food deserts, healthcare deserts survive the squalor or die because of it. These systemic inequities are mod ern expressions of the same corruption of the stewardship of wealth used for dominance, for control, rather than for uplifting.

Today’s cultural extremities are drawn from the same playbook, or more accurately framed, is the principle on which this nation of an alleged Christian foundation, and wealth dominance capital ism was founded the economic, social, and political top rung of the wealthy, and the expendables beneath.

The irony is that the oft-referenced “Ameri can people” the poor, the working poor, the middle income and tentative security of the middle class, are clueless that their values, their wellbeing are expendable in a nation governed by millionaires and billionaires. The failure of stewardship has evolved into systemic domination.