Bondage of the Free

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a short piece over at The Atlantic about reminiscences from former slaves who wax longingly for "the old days." He points out that the usual naive narrative we've constructed around slavery holds that every moment of enslaved life was unpleasant and those exploited by the evil inherent in the system longed at every moment to be free of it.

Of course, this is an absurd position. Humans are incredibly inventive and plastic, and no matter how immoral the social structure, we will always find ways to carve out space for the creation of self. Especially in an ossified structure such as that of the antebellum South, those who were enslaved were able to establish ways of finding joy and expressing creativity in spite of a system trying to deprive them of their humanity. Third wave feminist scholars have spent a couple of decades showing the ingenious ways in which oppressed people are able to either subvert their lack of power or use their lack of power in a way that establishes power. This fact does not obviate the evil of slavery, it merely allows us to paint a more honest, sympathetic, and three-dimensional picture of those who suffered under one of history's great injustices.

The longing expressed by Clara Davis in the writing Coates discusses needs to be understood in terms of its context in which Davis was not looking at slavery in a vacuum, but in terms of a comparison with the life that followed emancipation. When we are oppressed, we often think of the elimination of our greatest burden as the removal of all barriers to happiness. But simply because you no longer toil under one evil, does not mean that others do not await. When a system is in place long enough, we learn the rules, negotiate and discover pockets of space for self, and figure out how to live as best we can inside of what becomes familiar. Change eliminates that and forces us to rebuild and renegotiate in a way that is often painful to all. We are, to this day, still seeing wars in all of the places that had been colonized by Europeans. It is not accidental that there has been fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Cashmere. When these places were given their autonomy, the process failed to thoughtfully put in place mechanisms to recreate the stability necessary for human flourishing.

in the same way, we can see that some of the more thoughtful pro-slavery apologists predicted what we find in the passage Coates quotes. In writing the article "The Greening of White Pride" with a cultural geographer colleague of mine that examined the history of pro-environmental stands among explicitly racist groups, I read George Fitzhugh. He wrote the book A Sociology for the South in which he argues that the enslaved Africans had two choices: either they could be exploited by the Southern plantation owners for their labor or they could be exploited in the fashion of Northern factory owners for their labor. As property, the plantation owners had (what he did not see as a perverse) incentive to take care of the slaves. As a result, they received as slaves what we would now call fringe benefits wherein their housing, food, and health were all of concern to their owners. As free workers, however, they would be no more human in that they would have to work for factory owners who would see them as completely expendable human resources because of their lack of scarcity. Life in Uncle Tom's Cabin may have been awful, he argues, but you escape it only to walk into Sinclair's world of The Jungle.

Yes, this argument ignores the actual inhumane treatment of slaves and proceeds on the racist assumption that the freed slaves were not capable of ascending to the positions of white factory owners because they were not intelligent enough. But it is true that emancipation would in fact proceed along the same lines as decolonization where those freed would not be given the means or infrastructure needed to acquire that which would allow them to flourish in their new world -- indeed, they have been implicitly and explicitly undermined in it ever since.

As such, Davis' words follow directly from Fitzhugh's vision. The longing is not for slavery, but for a stable system in which one knew where one stood and could in that place create oneself. Her words are really less about slavery than they are about justice after emancipation and our ability as working people in the modern world to be more than cogs in an economic machine. We see progress in terms of corporate efficiency and not human happiness and that makes for a particular form of life. The freed slave was not truly emancipated and that holds equally well for those whose great-grandparents were the Lithuanian immigrants who worked in the Chicago sausage factories as those who toiled in the fields. Clara Davis speaks to us all and Coats is absolutely right that hers is a voice we all need to hear thoughtfully.