White Lion (1619)

---

The Back Story

Sea captain, John Jope, recounts his journey across the Atlantic to Jamestown, Virginia. Aboard his ship, the White Lion, is a cargo of enslaved Africans captured from their homes in the Ndongo Kingdom of Angola in West Central Africa, 150 miles from the Atlantic coast. Anthony, Isabela, William, Angela, Anthony, Frances, Margaret, Anthony, John, Edward, Anthony and others were so named by Portuguese missionaries after first being captured by the Portuguese and their allies, the Imbangala, as slaves for their trade.¹ Most likely Kimbundu-speaking people, these Angolans had originally been prisoners aboard the São João Bautista bound for Vera Cruz, Mexico when they were stolen by the White Lion and another English ship, the Treasurer.

Arriving initially at Point Comfort, on the southern tip of the Virginia peninsula late in August 1619, Captain Jope sells “20 and odd Negroes” in exchange for food. Others are then transported to Jamestown, where they are sold again. Three or four days later, the Treasurer arrives in Virginia, where its captain sells two or three additional Africans. Once in Virginia, the Africans are dispersed throughout the colony.²

The Whiteness Factor

How does Captain Jope manage to distance himself from the incredible suffering occurring below deck? How does he justify inflicting such pain on other human beings and why would he want to?

Aside from simply making someone disappear (which happened plenty), the next best way to create emotional distance is to reinforce a narrative about a fundamental difference in value. If John Jope can see himself as the highest form of humanity and the enslaved Africans as less than human, he’s off to a good start. Captain Jope’s internalized racial superiority came through a process that teaches all Whites to see ourselves as the norm – for everything we consider good and acceptable and for standards of beauty, intelligence, language, theology, business, justice and all other aspects of culture. This process started before Jope and continues across the generations.

Seeing ourselves as the norm allows us to avoid identifying characteristics of our group, so we seldom speak of ourselves in those terms. We think of ourselves simply as people, humans, individuals. We’re just…normal. If something terrible occurs, like a mass shooting or an overtly racist act, we can frame it as being a problem with one or more individuals – not with our group as a whole. On the other hand, we commonly refer to others with different ethnicities or darker skin in terms of collectives: Native American, Black, Hispanic, Asian. This insistance on seeing ourselves only as individuals makes it easier to maintain emotional distance from oppression that we perpetuate as a group (through systems).

Dehumanizing the Angolans on the White Lion was key to being able to justify the cruelty used to subjugate them. But a corresponding dehumanization was also taking place in the people who came to be known as White. It was the lust for land, wealth and power that drove the evolution of White superiority and racism. Over the centuries, methods for reinforcing Whiteness expanded into all aspects of culture in the American colonies and what is now the United States. Whiteness has burrowed in deeply enough to form a symbiotic relationship with every institution: religion, housing, healthcare, education, tech, industry and manufacturing, the military, finance, entertainment and media, the non-profit sector, the criminal justice system and government. Whiteness is an integral part of the system, and that system is working!

1. Hampton, Four Centuries on the Bay
2. Virginia’s First Africans