scATX: Speaker's Corner in the ATX

I’m only 100 pages into this stunning book but I am totally and completely captivated by it.

I have been studying the history of slavery for a while now and one of the things that is a MAJOR challenge for the field is how to deal with both the brutality of the system and the legacy that the system created.  Everyone knows the system was brutal so how do you write about that without capitalizing on it or sensationalizing it?  And it’s very tricky, especially as a historian, to write about the legacy of slavery without being charged with being teleological (starting from the present and seeing how the past explains it instead of trying to understand the past on its own terms) or moralistic.

In the end, I’m not as concerned about the moralistic part because I never doubt for a second ever that the history I do, the work I create, the stories I am drawn to are because of how I view the world through my own lens of morality.  Objectivity is never my aim or my goal.

But the other things — sensationalizing violence and being teleological — are concerns of mine.  And they are things that people in the field focus on and talk about and obsess over, as they should.

Yet, I often find myself reading articles and books by fabulous historians of slavery or the slave trade that feel sterile, rarely include individual actors, and are so rooted in their time that they suggest nothing about what comes after the end of slavery.  And I think that this causes us to be able to draw big giant lines between SLAVERY and NO SLAVERY, as if when the former dispersed, morphed, disappeared, the latter came into effect and there is little that connects them (especially when we talk institutionally about capitalism or science – we can easily forget that the modern version wouldn’t exist if not the for terrible racist beginnings that underpin the system even today).

The one space where this is NOT true is in the study of racism, civil rights, and racial justice.  There we can see the direct connections between slavery and emancipation.  But now that we exist in a supposed post-civil rights era and having elected our first president with not-white skin or a clear European ancestry, we have people arguing that slavery is an old issue, one that matters little, its effects, if there are any, are simply the tiniest of tiny ripples from the 19th century.

In thinking about all of these things as I write my own dissertation on slavery (one that rarely includes mention of violence, at least so far), I am more and more aware of how much work it takes to ignore the legacy of slavery beyond the time period I work on, to cast aside feelings of moral imperative, and to leave out stories of violence or death that grab your heart and hold on tight.

That is why reading Saidiya Hartman‘s breathtaking Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route is refreshing.  It’s also heart wrenching and hard.  I love every sentence of it and yet I can only take it in small doses, lest I get worn down by the sheer magnitude and the reality of her words.

The book is about Hartman’s search for her own identity, as her ancestors were slaves and thus her family tree only stretches a few generations back.  She went to Ghana, not looking for family, but looking for acceptance, a place where she belonged.  Surely Ghana would be a place that a black woman would be welcomed and accepted.  Surely there race was not a factor and being black was not a burden.  Yet, Ghana, like most (all?) of Africa is post-colonial and it has its own issues of racism, poverty, and pain.  Hartman was not accepted, she was treated as an outsider, and she came to understand that the legacy that slavery has left in Ghana is as tragic and terrible as the one left to black people in the US (as she herself writes, “Black life was even more expendable in Africa than in the United States; only the particulars varied.”).  She is trying to understand what it means to be the physical legacy of a system that enslaved and killed millions of people for a profit:

I am a reminder that twelve million crossed the Atlantic Ocean and the past is not yet over.  I am the progeny of the captives.  I am the vestige of the dead.  And history is how the secular world attends to the dead. (p. 18)

Her journey is enlightening and it is intense.  And it is worth your time.

I feel like I will probably be coming back to this text again on this blog when I reach the end, but today I just want to share two passages to drive home not only the amazing content of this work but also Hartman’s beautiful prose style.

First, her explanation of how capitalism was built on the bodies of the enslaved, the living and the dead (pg. 31):

For every slave who had arrived in the Americas, at least one and perhaps as many as five persons died in wars of capture, on the trek to the coast, imprisoned in barracoons, lingering in teh belly of a ship, or crossing the Atlantic.  Death also awaited them in pesthouses, cane fields, and the quarters.  Historians still debate whether twelve million or sixty million had been sentenced to death to meet the demands of the transatlantic commerce in black bodies.

Impossible to fathom was that all this death had been incidental to the acquisition of profit and to the rise of capitalism.  Today we might describe it as collateral damage.  The unavoidable losses created in pursuit of the greater objective.  Death wasn’t a goal of its own but just a by-product of commerce, which has had the lasting effect of making negligible all the millions of lives lost.  Incidental death occurs when life has no normative value, when no humans are involved, when the population is, in effect, seen as already dead.  Unlike the concentration camp, the gulag, and the killing field, which had as their intended end the extermination of a population, the Atlantic trade created millions of corpses, but as a corollary to the making of commodities.  To my eyes this lack of intention didn’t diminish the crime of slavery but from the vantage of judges, juries, and insurers exonerated the culpable agents.  In effect, it made it easier for a trader to countenance yet another dead black body or for a captain to dump a shipload of captives into the sea in order to collect the insurance, since it wasn’t possible to kill cargo or to murder a thing already denied life.  Death was simply a part of the workings of the trade.

Finally, Hartman talking about Elmina, the Ghana coastal city where so many people boarded boats to America, the place where they began the often deadly journey of the Middle Passage (pg. 54):

I scanned the town, hungry for a detail or trace of the hundreds of thousands of persons deported from the Gold Coast.  I tried to imagine how many sacked villages and abandoned dwellings and destroyed families and orphaned children made up this number. But I was unable to translate a string of zeros into human figures or to hear the clamor of slaves assembled on the beach or to catch a whiff of their fear as they stood before the ocean.  I tried to calculate how long it would have taken to embrace each one and whisper good-bye.  If each farewell took as long as a minute, it would have added up to seven hundred and seventy-seven days, a little over two years, which didn’t seem like enough time.  Besides, there had been no one to see them off and say I love you and we will never forget you.  These words were of no use now.

From WhatTamiSaid: Slavery, brought to you by the free market

I suggest you read the whole thing (it’s short) but here’s the part I love:

The free market is amoral and it will tolerate much–even holding human beings in bondage–if doing so benefits the economic or social interests of the majority, or even a powerful few.

And so, when Rand Paul suggests that the free market can do the work of the Civil Right Act, it is not just laughable, but ahistorical. The free market, without intervention, often abides abuses against humanity and works against American ideals of liberty. And we needn’t refer back to the 18th century for evidence of that.

Because this is what Coca-cola thinks represents “history”:

In this video, a white, male student has fallen asleep while studying for his history exam.  Historical characters from his history books come alive and try to help wake him up.  French soldiers (who are the most important group with Napoleon in charge), Native Americans, and (I think) Japanese warriors are all well-represented.  Of course, they all only show up as agents of war and violence.

Still, my point is this:

There are NO black people.

And there is a single woman: Cleopatra.  And what is she doing?  Nothing.  Just watching as Ben Franklin figures out how to open the coke can, which is the winning strategy for waking the slumbering student.

Is that history, Coca-cola?  Soldiers, warriors, and fighter jets?  Also, some clever white western dudes?  And a watching woman?

If for no other reason, we have to keep black history and women’s history months just so whoever created these ads will learn some history.

Some still shots from the video are after the jump.

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I am both a historian and a feminist so I want to use this here so-called “Women’s History month” to start focusing on posting the stories of women in history.  And since February was a ridiculously busy month for me, I missed the opportunity to post on Black History Month.

I think both are still critical.  And I think that is sad.  But stories of women, stories of black people, and ESPECIALLY stories of women of color are often skipped over or deemed unimportant to a larger historical narrative.  That’s true as much in popular history as the profession of history.  I am constantly grateful that there are a group of scholars out there actively working against all of these realities and I try my best to be a part of them whenever I can.

This is all to say that I am going to begin trying to make an active point of talking about women, people of color, and especially women of color in history that I know about, find fascinating, etc.

If you have any recommendations of people I should spotlight or if you would like to write a guest post, let me know in comments or send me an email (speakerscorneratx [at] gmail [dot] com).

From The St. Petersburg Times:

Invoking legendary 19th century Sen. Henry Clay and the abolitionist movement, freshman Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., delivered his first Senate floor speech Wednesday to signal that he and the tea party are willing to compromise with opponents on the federal debt and spending cuts. [...]

“Many ask, will the tea party compromise? Can the tea party work with others to find a solution?” Paul said in his brief address. “The answer is, of course. There must be dialogue and ultimately compromise, but compromise must occur on where we cut spending.” [...]

Paul said he agonized over compromise questions and turned for guidance to the lessons of fellow Kentuckian Henry Clay, who was nicknamed “The Great Compromiser” during his long political career in the Senate and the House of Representatives during the first half of the 19th century.

In hopes of avoiding a civil war, Clay helped forge compromises in 1820 and 1850 that helped keep slavery alive, he said.

“Is compromise the noble position? Is compromise a sign of enlightenment? Will compromise allow us to avoid the looming debt crisis?” said Paul, who sits at Clay’s desk in the Senate chamber. “Henry Clay’s life is, at best, a mixed message.”

Instead, Paul said, he looks to Cassius Clay, Frederick Douglass and others in the anti-slavery movement as inspirations because “they said slavery is wrong, and they would not compromise.”

“Now, today, we have no issues, no moral issues that have equivalency with the issue of slavery, yet we do face a fiscal nightmare, potentially a debt crisis in our country,” he said Wednesday.

[NB: Cassius Clay was Henry Clay's cousin, not a 20th-c boxer.]

Barf.  Please, Republicans, Tea Partiers, STOP saying that you are morally equivalent to abolitionists, especially those who were enslaved and then gained their freedom and then used the rest of their lives to fight for the freedom of other enslaved peoples.  You even know you shouldn’t say it because you say it right there, right after you said that you were like abolitionists.  [Also, side note: if the ONE thing you have in common with abolitionists is a refusal to compromise then maybe you need to address your larger goals generally.]

And yet, you can’t seem to stop yourself.  Just because you are on the unpopular side of a political battle, that doesn’t make you a saint or a hero or an abolitionist no matter how many times you try to make us believe that.

And also, I can’t forget that you are someone who doesn’t like the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  So, in short, I’m actually just going to go with, “shut the fuck up” and leave it at that.

[h/t to PR for this story]

As a historian of people who left very little written record behind, I know the frustration that comes with depending mainly on the written word to make sense of the past.  We use other things than the written word to create a full picture of the past: images and archeological finds come to mind.  But above all, we use text.  This is the great limit of history – it can be discovered where it was recorded in words.

That is why historians and archivists flip their lid when they see or hear about stories like this:

Just hours before Abraham Lincoln “put on his hat and headed for Ford’s Theater,” on April 14, 1865, the president is said to have spared a mentally incompetent Army private the death penalty for desertion.

The legendary act of compassion was revealed by Thomas Lowry, an amateur historian, who said he found the pardon among hundreds of untapped Lincoln documents in the National Archives in 1998 and described it in a book the following year. His discovery was hailed by scholars as one of the biggest findings of Lincoln memorabilia in the 20th century.

But on Monday, the National Archives disclosed that Dr. Lowry had altered the date on the original pardon to promote his book, changing the year to 1865 from 1864, possibly to make it look as if the pardon was one of the president’s final acts — and thus historic. [...]

“He indicated that he snuck a pen in — a Pelikan pen — and he marked the document and changed the date for the simple reason of getting some notoriety,” said Mitchell Yockelson, an investigator for the National Archives.

Dr. Lowry insisted in an interview Monday that the alteration was not his doing.

“It’s against my code of ethics,” he said. “I got leaned on for two hours with a mixture of pressure and false promises. While they weren’t driving splinters under my fingernails, they said I wouldn’t hear from them again.”

Well, he has gone from famous to infamous.  He’ll be remembered, that is for sure.

There just isn’t that much stuff left behind, even when we are talking about big important white dudes.  Yes, when writing a dissertation, it feels like there are unending documents.  But in truth, it is a finite number.  There is very little on which to construct our knowledge of the past.  So, please, don’t go around messing up what we do have and then lying about it.  Sheesh.

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Related:

• Official Press release from the National Archives

First, from Historiann (I seriously want to make a lifelong commitment to this post, I love it that much):

I’ve always thought that there was a very straightforward reason for why university faculty and other highly educated people tend not to support Republican ideas:  the more you know about the world, the dumber they seem. There’s no conspiracy at universities against conservative ideas–indeed, even Marxist Feminists like me teach about very conservative ideas all the time: patriarchy, hierarchy, Thomas Hobbes, the Divine Right of Kings, nineteenth century proslavery ideology, anti-women’s suffrage, anti-unionism, anti-communism, Father Coughlin, the John Birch Society, Impeach Earl Warren bumper stickers, “free market” ideology, and the like.  And you know what happens?  When students read the primary sources laying out these ideas, they usually see them for what they are:  brutally, coarsely self-interested,  unfair, and un-American.

And from Jezebel, “Town Doesn’t Give a Shit About Roethlisberger Rape Controversy Anymore” (which, you know, isn’t surprising seeing how the NFL and reporters of the NFL forgave him the day he returned from his suspension):

But the worst response comes from the D.A. who declined the case, Fred Bright, because of its importance. Bright lets us know that he’s moved on, too. “[Roethlisberger]‘s success on the football field, what does that have to do with what happened here in Milledgeville? It’s over. The case is over.” Dude, the case never even began.

Also, watch this video (via The Improvised Life):

For more about the Fun Theory project.

[UPDATED on Jan. 2, 2012: Since I wrote this post, the way I talk about reproductive rights has evolved. More than people who identify as "women" can and do get pregnant, they also want and need access to pre-natal, abortion, labor and delivery, and post-partum care.]

This weekend I wrote a post about RedState’s messed up take on abortion.  It calls for violence, it calls women “locations”, and it equates the institution of slavery with the right to choose.  I wrote about the final thing in the original post but I feel like it deserves its own longer post.

[NB: I am a PhD candidate currently writing my dissertation about slavery in the early modern world.  I write about enslaved females as they come up in my primary sources but I am no authority on the subject.  Clearly, I tried to do my research and provide evidence as best I could.  But if you know more about this topic, please let me know.  I'm always happy to learn about the history of slavery, the history of women, and the history of enslaved women.  Cheers!]

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RedState took up the argument that the enslaved in antebellum America are equivalent to fetuses in the womb:

Twice in our nation’s history, arrogant and power-mad Supreme Court Justices have declared that certain humans are exempt from the promise of the Declaration and the guarantees of the Constitution.

In the first instance, in Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court drew a line and declared that those on the “slave” side of the line were entitled to no protection from the law, and could be treated with impunity by their masters.  That slaves were human was beyond dispute; instead, the Court found solace in an artificial and tortured distinction which treated those humans belonging to the category of “slave” as a special kind of human that was not to be treated like the rest of humanity.

In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court repeated the same exercise, this time engaging in spectacular mental gymnastics with the word “person”….  And thus the Supreme Court drew a line and declared that those humans on the “person” side were entitled to the right to life, and those on the “non-person” side (as defined by the Court) were not. The combined effect of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton was that a line was drawn at physical location within a woman’s womb.

Earlier this week, Rick Santorum said that Obama should be anti-choice because he is a black man and so had family in the slave trade or something (though, of course, Obama’s father was Kenyan, not African-American so…).  Glenn Beck, of course, said this about slavery and abortion back in Sept and you can find these ideas on blog posts around the interwebs.  Andrew Sullivan responds,

I’d add, however, that there is an obvious difference in as much as slave-owners did not own those “slaves” within their own bodies. Women do. And the defense of the freedom of that woman to do with her body as she sees fit is far more complicated than ending plantations.

Agreed.  It is much more complicated.  But what happened on those plantations is complicated, too.

This reading of history removes the enslaved female all together (which is, incidentally, how much of the history of the enslaved is written – “the enslaved” is assumed to be male unless otherwise noted.  As corkingiron pointed out in the comments on a related post, the numbers don’t make sense for this as the number of women versus men who were enslaved in the Americas was nearly equal.  The gender bias of the people who wrote about slavery at the time is a big reason we know less about enslaved women than men, though we can’t discount the gendered biases of historians nowadays, too).  Santorum, Beck, and the editors at RedState are talking about an institution of slavery that would not have had a place for abortion, that wasn’t full of sexual assault, that didn’t explicitly and coercively exploit women’s bodies for both production and re-production.  What about those female slaves who used abortion to make sure that no child of theirs was born into an enslaved state, to destroy the property of their masters, to get rid of the result of a rape (an act that was completely and totally legal), to stop their already strained bodies from one more, very possibly deadly labor?

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Cribbed the transcript from Womanist Musings’ post.

Louis C. K. on the Tonight Show talking about why black people in this country have the right to complain more than white people do:

You can’t take people’s historical context away from them. Everybody always want us to. Like, White people are like come on it wasn’t us.  Like they want Black people to forget everything.

Like every year, White people add a hundred years to how long ago slavery was. I’ve heard educated people say that slavery was four hundred years ago. No it very wasn’t.  It was a hundred and forty years ago.  That’s two seventy year old ladies living and dying back to back. That’s how recently you could buy a guy.

And it’s not like slavery ended and everything has been amazing. It just… Oh yeah it’s like a clean shit where you don’t have to wipe, just boom and then it’s been parades and presents ever since.

You gotta remember that if you meet a Black person and they have grey hair, that they remember a time when they had to use a certain toilet, so give them a little time to be cranky.

And by the way White people have their own stuff that we went through, that hurt us that we have to cope with, like when they took our slaves away.  That was really hard for us.

Womanist Musings has the video and the entire transcript (this is just a piece) on her post.  Go there to see it (and, you know, read her awesome blog).

When Oscar Grant’s murderer involuntary manslaughter-er, Johannes Mehserle, was 1) found guilty and 2) sentenced to basically less than a year in jail, the news outlets wanted us out there in the viewing world to believe that black people in Oakland were going to explode with rage and riot through the streets, ala the LA riots/Rodney King verdict in 1992.  It has also recently been reported that Haitians are angry and rioting as a response to the ongoing deadly cholera epidemic.  This has been blamed on both these Haitians’ misunderstanding of where the cholera originated and political manipulation by those trying to win elections.  Also, there was that whole post-Katrina “looting” vs. “finding” thing…

I believe that the coverage of crisis that focuses on the rioting of a black population is part of a long, long, long racist history.  Black people in this country are often painted as angry, volatile, and always on the verge of plundering white people’s stuff.  Of course, for someone who studies the history of slavery, it is obvious to me that these ideas are DIRECT descendants of racist ideas about slaves.  These were ideas that were created by people who needed moral and practical reasons for exhibiting such extreme force on other people.  Rioting black people in Oakland or LA are treated rhetorically in the same way as rebellious slaves were in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Caribbean or South Carolina.

Yet, I don’t know enough about the specific history of blaming black people for rioting and pillaging and destroying things outside of the history of a slave society (a society whose economy functions completely because of slavery, not simply a society that has slaves; the former would, theoretically, fall apart without slaves because the economy would cease to function) in order to really lay down hard facts (which is all I ever want to do as a historian).  I want to PROVE that there is a continuity, not just that I am 95% that there is one.  I want an example from a non-slave society is what I am saying.

This is all just to preface something I read just now in a book on abolitionism.  It is a chapter on black abolitionism in the period of the American Revolution.  It’s titled, “‘A Chosen Generation’: Black Founders and Early America”, by Richard S. Newman in Prophets of Protest.  He begins his chapter with a story about two “former slaves who became two of Philadelphia’s leading free black figures.”  Pennsylvania had begun abolishing slavery in 1780 (but it was a gradual process) and its economy was not at all contingent on the institution of slavery by the end of the of the eighteenth century (if ever – nothing like the Caribbean or, say, Virginia or the Carolinas at that time or the deep south in the century to come).  The two men wrote a pamphlet in 1794 that they wanted to publish.  One of their specific desires for publishing it was to criticize “the racist stereotypes perpetrated by printer Matthew Carey, whose own best-selling pamphlet about Philadelphia’s yellow fever epidemic [of 1793] castigated blacks for allegedly pillaging and plundering white homes.”  They said this was simply not true and, if anything, “blacks saved Philadelphia through their virtuous volunteer work” (59).  The pamphlet then goes on to make an appeal to antislavery.

I found this anecdote amazingly interesting.  This was 1794 in a place where slavery was virtually non-existent and where it did exist, it was not part of the economy in a way that it was necessary to perpetuate ideas about the evils of the rebelling enslaved (of course, NB: Haitian revolution began in 1791 – that shit scared the hell out of white people).  This idea that black Philadelphians used the yellow fever epidemic to pillage and plunder was just a racist idea about black people that came from racist ideas about slaves. Reports of rebellions always made the papers and probably spread like gossip through the streets and taverns.  It was a small leap from the fear of black slave rebellion to the fear of black rebellion in general.  It’s clearly a fear many Americans still carry with them over 200 years later.

So, there in 1794 Philadelphia, we find black Americans struggling to combat the idea that they did not riot and plunder during a scary time for the city (which most people must have believed in order for them to feel the need to publicly confront this popular sentiment).  It is the same thing that Inoculated City was trying to prove following the clearly biased media attention of the “violent protests” in the aftermath of the Mehserle sentencing.

Basically, what I am trying to say with all of this (so that I can point to this whenever this issue comes up): when you jump to the conclusion that black people are going to riot and destroy property simply because they are black, you are making a racist statement that is seeped in a racist history that comes directly out of racist ideas created during the time of slavery in this country.

That’s all.