The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (4 page)

Confined like captured or domesticated animals to cage-like spaces, slaves knew that if they tried to escape, they would be pursued by armed patrollers who canvassed the country “just like dogs hunting rabbits.” And once seized for any offence, as
Joe Ray recalled his childhood on an Arkansas plantation, “Dere was two overseers on the place and dey carried a bull whip all the time.… I saw a slave man whipped until his shirt was cut to pieces! Dey were whipped like horses.” If the master “didn’t want dem beat to death … Dat’s too much money to kill,” “they would take your clothes off and whip you like you was no more than mules.”
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From antiquity, chattel slavery was modeled on the property rights traditionally claimed for domestic animals, which meant that human beings could be bought, sold, traded, leased, inherited, included in a dowry, gambled, or lost as debt—abrupt changes in identity that negated or deeply compromised marriage, parenthood, or family relations in what historian-sociologist
Orlando Patterson has termed a state of “social death.” As the American freedwoman
Mollie Barber recalled, every time her owners “need[ed] some money, off dey sell a slave, jest like now dey sell cows and hogs at de auction places.” And Professor Bay quite convincingly sees the auction, to which slaves were driven on foot by mounted white men, as the epitome of bestialization:

In recent decades historians have shown that from 1790 to 1860 the southwestern expansion of slavery in the United States depended on such animalizing auctions and on a vast internal movement of over a million slaves, conducted by coastal slave ships as well as by overland coffles of chained men, followed by slave women and children, often trudging seven or eight weeks on foot as they moved toward Louisiana or Texas.
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I should emphasize that Bay’s evidence on “being treated like animals” is repeatedly confirmed by numerous earlier slave narratives addressed to Northern audiences; but the WPA testimony is especially convincing, since animal parallels were clearly far removed from the white Southern proslavery mythology of that time. The elderly freedpeople’s language signified an enduring black experience. By the same token, Bay shows that freed blacks long continued to use animal comparisons in Southern
Jim Crow society. If they were no longer regularly whipped or sold at auctions, many felt they had been turned loose like aged horses and cows without their own fields in which to graze. For the black day laborer, prison farm worker, or sharecropper, still stigmatized by race, emancipation failed to lead to some kind of humanizing “free soil.” And, as we shall see, the theory of inherent black bestiality acquired a kind of tsunami force in the 1880s and 1890s, given the obsession of radical Southerners with lynching as an antidote to the supposedly near-universal desire of black men to rape white women.

Bay’s thesis stresses the continuing determination of African Americans, both slave and free, to reject and counteract all attempts at
animalization. Even the few blacks who accepted the argument that Noah’s biblical “
curse of
Ham” had
justified their enslavement, joined in the continuing defense and assertion of their humanity. Yet, as we
will see, a very few radical blacks who called for a slave revolt also condemned black slaves for a docility and subservience that seemed to be the result of unprecedented oppression.

But dehumanization has clearly been a central aspect of slavery from ancient times, and what I have referred to as “the problem of slavery” involves the impossibility, seen throughout history, of converting humans into totally compliant, submissive chattel property. Nevertheless, from
ancient Greece to the development of New World colonies and on to the prosperous American South in the mid-nineteenth century, slave labor has proved to be remarkably productive, effective, and economically successful. And racial slavery generated new forms of racism, which encouraged efforts at animalization in extreme and systematic forms. In the next chapter we will explore how the whites’ projection on blacks of unwanted “animal” traits and attributes highlighted the slaves’ supposed incapacity for freedom—a crucial issue for the “Age of Emancipation.” Animalization also raised the issues of psychological
internalization and black self-esteem—questions that by no means disappeared with emancipation. Accordingly, before turning to the
Haitian Revolution, black
colonization, and other highly selective aspects of the “Age of Emancipation,” I want to explore in some detail some subjects that lie at the heart of slavery’s “problem.”

Traveling through the South in 1856, the famous journalist and landscape designer
Frederick Law Olmsted remarked to a white overseer that it must be disagreeable to punish slaves the way he did. The overseer replied, “Why, sir, I wouldn’t mind killing a nigger more than I would a dog.”
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Does this mean that blacks who were treated like animals were literally seen as “only animals,” or as an entirely different species from humans? The answer is clearly no, except perhaps in some extreme cases and for very brief periods of time—as for example in the post-emancipation
lynching era, when many black men accused of
raping white women were hanged or tortured, dismembered, and burned alive, occasionally before immense cheering crowds of Southern white men, women, and children.
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Degradation and insult are reinforced every day when people call other people curs, pigs, swine, apes, bitches, and sons of bitches, terms which momentarily dehumanize one party while enhancing the
“non-animal” superiority of the other. But animalization can cover a spectrum from superficial insult to the justification of slavery and on to
lynching and
genocide.

Thus the use of such animal metaphors as lice, vermin, microbes, and cockroaches, as in the Nazi
Holocaust, lowers the process to a different level, justifying the complete extermination of an impure enemy group that supposedly threatens the basic health of society and therefore has no right to exist. I am mainly concerned here with the psychological and linguistic process, as a way of dealing with the question of whether humans who were treated like animals were ever literally seen as “only animals,” since a discussion of diverse motives would lead us far astray. The world had never seen such an extreme and systematic engine of dehumanization as the Nazi propaganda machine, epitomized by
Joseph Goebbels’s assertion in an early speech (March 7, 1942) that “It is a life-or-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish microbe. No other government and no other regime would have been able to muster the strength to find a general solution to this issue.” Nearly a year later, SS Reichsführer
Heinrich Himmler would expand the point in a speech to SS officers:

Given the Nazi example, it is worth noting that the antipode of this animalizing can be seen in a universal tendency to project our potentiality for self-transcendence, freedom, and striving for perfection onto images of kings, dictators, demagogues, and cultural heroes of various kinds. This form of idolatry, which ancient
Judaism fortunately singled out as the most dangerous sin facing humanity, can also appear in various kinds of narcissism and egocentrism, as when an individual imagines that he is godlike and free from all taint of finitude and corruption.

There is actually a long history to the links between animalization and genocide or ethnic cleansing, and the formula by no means ended with the
Nazis. In 1994, when the
Hutu slaughtered some 800,000
Tutsi neighbors in Rwanda, the victims were repeatedly likened to
inyenizi,
or cockroaches.
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But were
Jews and Tutsis truly seen as nonhumans, as the actual equivalent of microbes, lice, or cockroaches? Given the appalling realities of mass murder, we are intuitively inclined to think yes. Why else would
Himmler try to persuade SS officers that their actions would be exactly the same as delousing? Fortunately, philosopher
Kwame Anthony Appiah has insightfully clarified this issue as his discussion of ethics moves from social hierarchy to insiders/outsiders and on to genocidal massacres. In accounting for genocide, “the familiar answer” presumes that members of some outgroup are not considered “human at all.” Yet that “doesn’t explain the immense cruelty—the abominable cruelty,” which is not evident even in the extermination of pests. As Appiah then reasons:

Appiah adds in an endnote that the victimizers always “tell you why their victims—Jews or
Aztecs or Tutsi—deserve what’s being done to them.”
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That was emphatically true of the
Nazis, who pictured the Jews not only as an active global threat to civilization throughout history, but in World War II as the hidden conspiratorial force behind both their Soviet and Western enemies. Clearly this retention of a human element fails to make animalization more humane. Quite the contrary.

At this point it should be clear that “dehumanization” means the eradication not of human
identity
but of those elements of humanity that evoke respect and empathy and convey a sense of dignity. Dehumanization means the debasement of a human, often the reduction to the status of an “animalized human,” a person who exemplifies the so-called animal traits and who lacks the moral and rational capacities that humans esteem. As Appiah implies, this extreme dehumanization deprives the victims even of the kind of sympathy and connectedness often given to Alzheimer patients or those in a coma.

I would only add that since the victims of this process are perceived as “animalized humans,” this double consciousness would probably involve a contradictory shifting back and forth in the recognition of humanity. When
Henry Smith, an African American accused of rape, was tortured and killed in 1893 before a
Texas mob of some ten thousand whites, many in the crowd no doubt saw him momentarily as “nothing but an animal” as they watched hot irons being pressed on his bare feet and tongue and then into his eyes, and heard him emit “a cry that echoed over the prairie like the wail of a wild animal.”
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Conversely, we have reports of German soldiers who momentarily recognized the true humanity of individual
Jews as they were herded toward the gas chambers.

In any event, the creation of “animalized humans” can produce a mental state in the victimizers and spectators that disconnects the neural sources of human identification, empathy, and compassion, the very basis for the
Golden Rule and all human ethics. In extreme cases, this means the ability to engage in torture or extermination without a qualm. But the focus on extreme cases can obscure the fact, emphasized by
David Livingstone Smith, that “we are all potential dehumanizers, just as we are potential objects of dehumanization.”
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No doubt many situations arise, especially in war, where people kill or inflict pain without misgivings and without any explicit animalization.
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But the victims must still be
dehumanized
in similar ways. And animalization, which also appears in such group differentiations as class, caste, and ethnicity, as well as race, clearly makes the process easier for large collective groups.
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