The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (5 page)

One explanation, as already suggested, involves the projection on victims or on groups such as slaves of an exaggerated version of the so-called animal traits that all humans share and often fear and repress.
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This psychological process deprives the dehumanized of those redeeming rational and spiritual qualities that give humans a sense of pride, of dignity, of being made in the image of God. At the same time, the projection enables the victimizers to become almost psychological parasites, whose self-image is immeasurably enhanced by the dramatic contrast with the degraded and dehumanized “Other.” But why have we humans been so concerned with our “animality,” and what is the ultimate source of this desire to animalize other humans—apart from the quite diverse motives of slaveholders, white supremacists, and
Nazis? Here I would turn to
Reinhold
Niebuhr’s view of the core of human “distinctiveness,” as opposed to other animals, in the fear, self-doubt, anxiety, and even pride and confidence generated by the dilemma of finitude and freedom. The dilemma that prompts us to ask, “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” “What is it all about?” As Niebuhr remarks, while surveying the ways we distinguish the self from the totality of the world, “The vantage point from which man judges his insignificance is a rather significant vantage point.”
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If one samples some typical quotations on the human condition, we see a single answer in the tension between our sense of our existential animal finitude (evoked by our discovery in childhood that we are certain to die) and our capacity for self-reflection, for making ourselves our own object. Countless poets and philosophers have agreed with
Charles Caleb Colton (1780–1830): “Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.”

As expressed by the great French Renaissance essayist
Montaigne, “Man sees himself lodged here in the mud and filth of the world, nailed and fastened to the most lifeless and stagnant part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house, at the furthest distance from the vault of Heaven, with the vilest animals; and yet, in his imagination, he places himself above the circle of the moon, and brings Heaven under his feet.” Or according to
Edward Tyson, a founder of comparative anatomy whose dissection of a chimpanzee in 1698 led him to the view that “
Man
is part a
Brute,
part an
Angel
; and is that
Link
in the Creation, that joyns them both together.” Or
Edward Young, an eighteenth-century religious poet much favored by the later British abolitionists: “
Helpless
Immortal! Insect
infinite
! / A worm! a God! I tremble at myself, / And in myself am lost! At home a stranger.” And Lord
Byron, first in Sardanapalus: “I am the very slave of circumstance / And impulse—borne away with every breath! / Misplaced upon the throne—misplaced in life. / I know not what I could have been, / but feel I am not what I should be—let it end.”

But then, in Byron’s
Sonnet to Chillon: “Eternal spirit of the chainless mind! / Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art, / For there thy habitation is the heart, / The heart which love of thee alone can bind.”
¹²

When I think of myself wholly in terms of my eating, sleeping, urinating, defecating, cutting toenails (claws), scratching an itch, aging and dying, there can be no question that I am a finite mammal. This exercise, which runs against the grain of a lifetime of “civilizing” and
self-idealizing, requires some concentrated effort. But as we define ourselves as rational animals,
Homo sapiens,
we continue to marvel over our amazing capacity for self-reflection and rational analysis—for viewing ourselves from a vantage point outside the self, for analyzing our own introspection, and for imagining what it would be like to be someone else, including their own imaginings, even a slave or animal. The 100 billion neurons in our brains enable us even to study and understand
their
own actions.

Much human behavior is driven not by simple desires for food, money, sex, and security, but by our need to respond to this paradoxical nature. According to
Niebuhr’s classic analysis, the anxiety generated by this paradoxical condition can lead to a denial of our capacity for rationality and self-transcendence, in the sin of
sensuality; or, far worse, to a denial of our animality itself, the
sin of pride.
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Animalizing other people is clearly an expression of the sin of pride and was long encouraged, as we will see, by the constant ubiquity and interaction with domesticated animals, as well as by the sharp conceptual division between humans and animals imposed by Western culture.

The psychological mechanism of animalization has been so deeply implanted in white culture, with respect to African Americans, that most white Americans have been unaware of their usually unconscious complicity as well as the significant benefits they have reaped from their “
transcendent whiteness.” Especially during the period of racial slavery, the process of animalizing blacks enhanced the whites’ sense of being a rational, self-disciplined, and ambitious people, closely attuned to their long-term best interests. Racism became the systematic way of institutionalizing and justifying the individual white’s projection of an “animal Id” upon blacks. It took the form of an intellectual theory or ideology, cloaked in science, as well as actions and behavior legitimated by laws, customs, and social structure.

As I wrote in a review of
Winthrop D. Jordan’s landmark book
White Over Black,
“The counter-image of the Negro became the living embodiment of what transplanted Europeans must never allow themselves to become.”
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This parasitic relationship gave special force to the whites’ sense of historical mission, the “American Dream” of overcoming the limits and boundaries of past history. But as I briefly explore later, a long succession of African American writers, beginning in the eighteenth century and including even
Barack Obama,
have conveyed the deeply felt effects of this process on individual and collective black self-esteem.

Yet the animalization of black slaves obviously differed markedly from that of groups in danger of
genocide. For one thing, slaves were valuable as chattel property and as investments, and in nineteenth-century America their value soared as they became increasingly important to the economy. Far from being in danger of extermination, the lives of slaves were at least legally protected by state laws and interpretations of common law that ruled that the murder of a slave was a crime punishable by death.
¹⁵

But if state laws and courts repeatedly recognized the humanity of slaves, Thomas Jefferson was far from being alone in
fearing an eventual war between the races, a war that many whites predicted would end in the extermination of all “Negroes.”
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And the related subject of black colonization, which had immense theoretical support among the American antebellum white population, promised an eventual removal of the black population by “peaceful means”—an option that even
Hermann Göring and some other
Nazi leaders favored for the
Jews before World War II and “the final solution.”

Finally, as we have seen, the populist
lynching of blacks began to reach epic levels in the 1880s and ’90s. The widespread acceptance of
scientific racism, a central prop for Jim Crow segregation and white supremacy, reinforced the traditional fear of sexual contamination, through
rape or intermarriage—the invasion of the
black Id, a reprisal of all the animalistic traits that had been projected on blacks to achieve white purity. In 1897,
Rebecca Latimer Felton, a prominent Georgia feminist, journalist, and eventually the first woman to become a U.S. senator, aroused national attention with a near hysterical speech on the peril of black rapists: “[I]f it takes lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from drunken, ravening human beasts,” she cried, “then I say lynch a thousand [blacks] a week if it becomes necessary.” Later, emphasizing the “moral retrogression” of blacks since the days of slavery, Felton accused the “promoters of Negro equality” of preparing the way for an imminent “revolutionary uprising” that “will either exterminate the blacks or force the white citizens to leave the country.” Fortunately, such extremists never came close to shaping federal policies, but it is significant that at the turn of the twentieth century the Chief Statistician of the U.S. Census,
Professor Walter Francis Willcox, and other prominent statisticians, happily predicted the gradual extinction of the Negro race.
¹⁷

It is almost impossible for us today to imagine the ubiquity and variety of
animals that would closely surround us if we had lived at any time from the Bronze Age to the early twentieth century. When I hear the word “animal” today, I do not automatically picture horses, oxen, donkeys, mules, cows, goats, pigs, sheep, chicken, ducks, rabbits, and geese. Yet, as we saw in the testimony of former slaves regarding the animalization of blacks, that was the context everyone had in mind. Everyone depended on beasts of burden for every kind of pulling and hauling as well as for transport. The food they ate required the aid of animals in plowing fields as well as the hunting of all sorts of game. Every day most people interacted with animals, especially horses, as much as we do with cars and computers.

Even in towns and cities residents kept a variety of animals in addition to pets. Our “liberation” from this proximity and total dependence must be taken into account if we are to understand the past. The linguistic legacy of labeling some people brutish and beastly arose in the context of human “dominion” over an immense range of species from bees to bulls. Ironically, despite this daily intimacy and proximity with animals, Western culture long posited an almost unbridgeable gap between humans and animals that has now been greatly eroded, thanks to a major cultural transformation regarding cruelty (originally focused on slaves and animals), as well as scientific discoveries from Darwin to DNA.
¹⁸

The animalization of people first required the “animalization” of animals, beings that can of course be described and understood in an infinite number of ways.
¹⁹
The
Oxford Thesaurus
of 1992 equates “animal” with “physical, fleshly, sensual, gross, coarse, unrefined, uncultured, uncultivated, rude, carnal, crude, bestial, beastlike, subhuman.” An older Webster’s
Dictionary of Synonyms
typically states that “When applied figuratively to human beings, animal either throws the emphasis on purely physical qualities or implies the ascendancy of the physical nature over the rational and spiritual nature.…” The
Free Online Thesaurus
tells us that “animalization” is “an act that makes people cruel or lacking in normal human qualities.”
²⁰
As historian
Keith Thomas has written, Renaissance Europeans repeated the proverb “as drunk as a dog,” though they had of course never seen a drunken dog:

Such examples of the animalization of animals are part of the wider and deeper phenomenon of “
anthropodenial,” a term popularized by philosopher
Martha Nussbaum and primatologist
Frans de Waal—meaning the opposite of the anthropomorphism we often apply especially to pets: “a blindness to the humanlike characteristics of other animals, or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves.” According to Nussbaum, this insistence on a brick wall separating humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, despite the fact that our DNA is roughly 98 percent like that of
chimpanzees, leads not only to appalling cruelties in treating animals but to certain failures of compassion for human suffering.
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While the forms of anthropodenial have changed over the centuries, having been strongly influenced by the ancient Greeks (though
Plato famously referred to “the wild beast within us”), this dualism separating man from beast lives at the heart of the Judeo-Christian worldview, beginning with the
Bible.

But before turning to the Bible, we should remember that
domestication did require the creation of close bonds between humans and animals. And for millennia men and women have loved all kinds of pets, have treated animals as companions, and have even worshipped animals as deities. Though slaves were denied such godhood, they could sometimes be loved or become trusted companions. And the view that slaves were essentially
children was often a variant on the animal metaphor. The permanent child would be equivalent in some ways to a dehumanized adult, a human who lacks the capacities of reason and self-introspection and analysis. And, like children, animals are petted, cuddled, and nurtured, or made to perform tricks as well as labor. Indeed, in many cultures small children were referred
to and treated as if they were animals: “little deer,” “little bear or wolf,” “little lion”; and in antiquity, partly to avoid starvation, untold thousands of babies and children were sold into slavery or abandoned so that others would bring them up as slaves. However loved or cherished a slave might be, animalization implied the excision or removal of some inner human qualities that helped to protect an adult man or woman from being treated as a mere object—as opposed to a moral “center of consciousness.”

Now to the
Bible. On the authority of
Genesis, God first creates all the moving, living creatures, the “creeping things,” fowls, whales, cattle, beasts of the earth. He blesses them, tells them to be fruitful and multiply, and sees that “it was good.” Then God says,