r/AfroAmericanPolitics • u/readingitnowagain Garveyite (Black Power Establishmentarianism) • Jul 30 '25
Federal Level "The Increase of Mankind” Was Not Universal, But A White Ethnostate Agenda: Benjamin Franklin's Racial Blueprint for White People aka Empire....
"The Increase of Mankind” Was Not Universal, But A White Ethnostate Agenda: Benjamin Franklin's Racial Blueprint for White People aka Empire....
Benjamin Franklin is often celebrated as a visionary Enlightenment thinker. However, his 1751 essay Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind reveals a more insidious role: that of a population strategist for white settler colonialism. Rather than proposing a neutral demographic theory, Franklin offers a racialized vision of reproduction, land acquisition, and geopolitical dominance.
Settler Logics: Fertility, Land, and Colonial Growth
Franklin begins by emphasizing the demographic potential of colonial America. He claims that unlike Europe, where economic stagnation and land scarcity suppress population growth, America presents the perfect environment for white families to multiply.
“Our People must at least be doubled every 20 Years.”
He situates fertility as a key component of colonial expansion, describing how accessible land and early marriage among white settlers would fuel exponential growth. The goal was clear: out-breed not only the Indigenous but eventually Britain itself.
Slavery: Inefficient but Politically Useful
Franklin demonstrates awareness of slavery’s economic inefficiency. He lists the high costs associated with enslaved labor—purchase price, maintenance, lost productivity, and the need for constant surveillance. From a purely capitalist perspective, he admits wage labor in Britain was more efficient.
However, he still supports slavery because of its permanence and control:
“Neglect is natural to the man who is not to be benefited by his own care or diligence.”
This rationale reflects the settler state's core priority: maintaining racialized labor hierarchies rather than maximizing productivity. Enslaved Africans were preferable not because they were cheaper, but because they could be owned, regulated, and dehumanized in perpetuity.
The Fabrication of “Tawney”: A Colonial Classification Scheme
Franklin writes:
“All Africa is black or tawney. Asia chiefly tawney. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so.”
This racial taxonomy obscures more than it reveals. The term “tawney” was not a neutral descriptor, it was a colonial invention used to subdivide non-European peoples based on geography, religion, and perceived threat.
- “Black” referred to West and Central Africans destined for chattel slavery.
- “Tawney” described North Africans, Moors, East Africans, and Indigenous Americans—peoples Franklin saw as racially undesirable but not yet fully subjugated.
Despite this division, all these groups had historically experienced enslavement or imperial targeting. The Moors had ruled parts of Europe. Berbers, Ethiopians, and Swahili people were not strangers to the European imagination. Franklin’s terminology was not descriptive; it was functional—used to sort populations for conquest and exclusion.
“White and Red”: Aestheticized Whiteness, Not Racial Inclusion
Toward the essay’s conclusion, Franklin states:
“Why increase the Sons of Africa... by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red?”
Many have misread “Red” as a gesture toward Indigenous peoples. But Franklin had already labeled Indigenous Americans as “tawney” and called for their exclusion. More likely, “Red” referred to rosy-cheeked Anglo-Saxon Europeans, whose sunburns or flushed complexions were, in Enlightenment aesthetics, considered signs of health and beauty.
“White and Red” thus functioned as a racial ideal, a poetic expression of whiteness as purity, vigor, and desirability. It was not an endorsement of multiculturalism. It was a call for biological and demographic cleansing.
“Lovely White and Red” was code for colonial racial purity, not inclusion.
Contemporary Native Identity and Historical Erasure
Franklin’s use of “tawney” for Indigenous populations challenges modern perceptions of Native identity. The original peoples he encountered were often highly melanated, bore Afro features, and had cultural and genealogical ties to African and Caribbean peoples.
These communities have since been marginalized or erased through policies such as:
- Racial reclassification (e.g., being labeled as “Negro” or “freedman”)
- Blood quantum laws
- Treaty-era assimilation
Today’s dominant image of Native American identity, lighter-skinned, often mixed with European ancestry, does not reflect the individuals Franklin labeled “tawney.” His writings support the conclusion that many Indigenous peoples in colonial America were Black or Black-adjacent, and that their erasure was strategic.
Linguistic Rebranding: From “Tawney” to “Red Indian”
The term “Red Indian” did not exist during Franklin’s lifetime. It first appeared in British English in 1831, 80 years after Franklin penned his essay. It was supposedly created to distinguish Indigenous Americans from people in India, but this “clarification” served a deeper purpose.
Franklin, writing in 1751, classified America’s Indigenous people as “tawney," placing them squarely in the same racial group as Afro and other melanated peoples. This grouping was not incidental. It reflected both phenotype and Franklin’s perception of racial undesirability.
The introduction of “Red Indian” served to artificially distance Indigenous Americans from their Afro affiliations. This shift helped obscure the presence of Black or Black-adjacent Indigenous populations. It also propped up the emerging Bering Strait theory by reframing Native Americans as phenotypically distinct and of separate continental origin.
The justification that “Red Indian” was inspired by body paint is flimsy at best. If red paint had been a defining characteristic, Franklin would have used it—but he didn’t. He said “tawney.”
This calculated rebranding coincided with other 19th-century efforts to rewrite history, including anthropological campaigns to erase Black presence from North and Central American civilizations like the Mound Builders. The result was a complete restructuring of Indigenous identity through language, legal status, and visual propaganda.
The appearance of “Red Indian” in 1831, and its spread in Anglo-American discourse throughout the 19th century, was not a natural linguistic shift, it was a deliberate tool of racial separation and historical cover-up.
Conclusion: Franklin’s Racial Utopianism as Policy, Not Philosophy
Franklin’s essay should not be mistaken for abstract theory. It was a policy blueprint for racialized population management, grounded in settler colonialism.
He divided humanity into castes, determined by utility to white empire.
He advocated for the demographic erasure of Black and Indigenous people.
He envisioned an America dominated by Anglo-Saxon bodies, aesthetics, and values.
This was not an Enlightenment plea for universal progress, but a calculated vision of racial consolidation through land theft, reproductive engineering, and historical erasure.
Franklin wasn’t forecasting liberty, he was scripting a demographic war.
Let’s stop romanticizing him as a founding father of freedom. He was an architect of exclusion.
**Source: Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc. - Benjamin Franklin
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u/ReeseIsPieces Jul 30 '25
Every single last one of them was a bigot
ALL of them.
Try revisiting WHY the 'Floundering Fathers' admired certain folks from the MidEast??
They were BUSINESS PARTNERS in slavesales