The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (8 page)

Aristotle did acknowledge that on occasion “slaves can have the bodies of free men” and that free men could have “only the souls and not the bodies of free men.” Even more troubling, he observed, was the fact that people “of the most respected family” sometimes become slaves “simply because they happened to be captured and sold.” But such instances of injustice could not weaken his conviction, which would help shape virtually all subsequent proslavery thought, that “it is clear that there are certain people who are free and certain people who are slaves by nature, and it is both to their advantage, and just, for them to be slaves.”

I am sure most readers have noticed that Aristotle linked the natural slave with an affirmation of female inferiority, as a supposedly obvious example of natural inequality. It has been convincingly argued that the earliest and archetypal human slaves were
women.
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In patriarchal societies, women were treated like domesticated or petlike animals in order to ensure their dependence and submission. In the Hebrew
Bible, as in
Homer and other early sources, male captives were typically killed on the spot; otherwise they might have escaped or risen in revolt. Before the rise of societies capable of absorbing large numbers of male slaves, women captives seem to have been customarily enslaved as workers or concubines. Aristotle’s association of female inferiority with a discussion of the natural slave also calls to mind a kind of ideological animalization, partly concealed by paternalistic idealization—that is, an almost universal focus on the female body in terms of sex, menarche, childbearing, and nursing—all accentuating women’s resemblance to the females of other species, with an implied exclusion of the “higher” rational capacities of mind and self-awareness.

As an example of Aristotle’s continuing influence, it is significant that his theory of the natural slave formed the framework for the momentous debate in Spain, in 1550–51, between
Juan Ginés Sepúlveda and
Bartolomé de Las Casas, on whether American Indians had been created to be natural slaves (with Las Casas attacking that conclusion, but not Aristotle’s basic premises). In 1495,
Columbus
had transported some five hundred Native American slaves to Spain and dreamed of a profitable slave trade of American Indians to
Iberia,
Italy, and
Sicily. But, for various reasons, after Las Casas had called for the protection of Indians and the importation in America of African slaves, both the Church and the Spanish government attempted to prohibit the genuine enslavement of Native Americans.
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While scientific racism eventually offered one way of arguing that a given group conformed to the ideal of the
natural slave, Aristotle’s making an analogy with domesticated animals pointed to the possibility that animalistic treatment might result in a psychological and even genetic transformation based on the internalization of slaveholders’ desires.

After drawing on comparisons of slaves with domestic animals that have been made throughout history, historian
Karl Jacoby has argued convincingly that the
domestication of sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, horses, and other animals during the
Neolithic r
evolution might well have served as a
model for enslaving humans.
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Whether used for food, clothing, transport, or heavy labor, these social animals underwent a Darwinian evolutionary process of
neoteny, or progressive “juvenilization.” That is, they became more submissive than their wild counterparts, less fearful of strangers, and less aggressive (which in physical terms was reflected in a shortening of the jawbone and a decrease in the size of the teeth). Far from being chance occurrences, these changes in anatomy and behavior were closely geared to human needs, especially in farming, though of course the human domesticators learned by trial and error and had no knowledge of the mechanisms of genetic engineering. Many mammals, such as
zebras, successfully resisted domestication.
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To control domesticated beasts, human beings devised collars, chains, prods, whips, and branding irons. They also castrated some dangerous males and subjected animals to selective breeding. More positive incentives arose from a kind of paternalism in which human beings replaced the dominant male animal that had exercised some control over the social group. Unlike later, inanimate resources such as coal and oil, animals were self-reproducing but had to be kept healthy and protected as much as possible from disease.

As Jacoby astutely observes, once economic development led to an increasing need for male labor for agriculture and public works, similar means of control were applied to human captives (including even
castration), whose foreign languages may have made them seem more like animals than men. After the harvests and livestock accumulated by agricultural societies had revolutionized the objectives of warfare, a well-planned raid to steal the wealth that a foreign community had saved from a year of labor might also involve the kidnapping of groups of workers, who could then be identified by different clothing, hair cutting, branding, collars, and other symbols.
Xenophon, like many other early writers on the management of slaves, “compared the teaching of slaves, unlike that of free workers, with the training of wild animals.”
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Yet, despite the countless attempts to equate human captives with domestic animals (the first African slaves shipped to Lisbon in the mid-1400s were stripped naked and marketed and priced exactly like livestock), slaves were fortunately never held long enough in distinct, isolated groups to undergo significant genetic change (as we can tell from DNA). Even so,
juvenilization, the development of childlike characteristics in slaves, was clearly the goal of numerous slaveholders, despite their lack of any scientific understanding of how domestication had changed the nature and behavior of animals. Even Aristotle’s description of the
natural slave’s mind and body pictured at least superficially what a human being would be like if “tamed” by
neoteny.
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Black abolitionists, such as fugitive slave
Henry Highland Garnet, fully grasped this point. In a famous speech to free blacks, urging slaves to resist, Garnet spelled out the goal of animalization:

As Garnet suggests, the slaveholder’s dehumanizing methods could lead to some internalization, some acceptance or contentment, “with a condition of slavery,” even if no genetic domestication took place.
Orlando Patterson, the great historian of comparative slavery, has argued that the “
Sambo” stereotype, with its “total absence of
any hint of ‘manhood,’ ” has been “an ideological imperative of all systems of slavery.” Patterson quotes the famous description by historian
Stanley Elkins:

Writing in the late 1950s, Elkins wished to emphasize the unprecedented harshness of American (as opposed to
Latin American) slavery, but his portrait of the infantilized “Sambo” infuriated liberals and radicals of the 1960s and 1970s who wished to celebrate slave autonomy and slave resistance. Patterson, who could not have been more aware of defiant and rebellious slaves throughout history, emphasized that the “Sambo” image “is no more realistic a description of how slaves actually thought and behaved than was the inflated conception of honor and sense of freedom an accurate description of their masters.” But without suggesting that slaves significantly
internalized “the conception of degradation held by their masters,” he recognized that slaves could hardly escape some feelings of being dishonored and degraded. This could mean an ability to play the role of “Sambo” as a way of deceiving whites. Countless black writers have referred to the “masks” blacks feel a need to wear when dealing with whites. But Patterson also quotes slaves expressing self-hatred and “psychological violence against [themselves]”: “De Massa and Missus was good to me but sometime I was so bad they had to whip me.… I needed de whippin’.”
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Of all the slaves or former slaves who left testimony, Frederick
Douglass would seem to be the last one we could imagine to have internalized even the slightest sense of white degradation. Very likely the son of his white owner, Douglass led a highly privileged boyhood, learned to read and write and school himself, and succeeded at age twenty in escaping to the North, where he became one of the few American “giants” of the nineteenth century. He became “one of the most meritorious men, if not the most meritorious man, in the United States,” as President Abraham
Lincoln put it—a leading abolitionist,
best-selling author, editor, spellbinding lecturer, adviser to President Lincoln, and U.S. ambassador.
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Yet at age sixteen Douglass discovered the harsh realities of slavery, when his relatively new owner,
Thomas Auld, chose to work him in the fields and have him disciplined by a so-called slave-breaker,
Edward Covey. After he had been “tamed” by interminable work and countless whippings, Douglass recalled: “Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed … the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!”

While Douglass eventually achieved a true sense of psychological freedom by fighting Covey and vanquishing him, at other times he had deeply felt that learning to read “had been a curse rather than a blessing … I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast.” After noting that on Sundays he spent his leisure time “in a sort of beast-like stupor, between sleep and wake, under some large tree,” Douglass admitted that “I was sometimes prompted to take my life.” And even in 1846, when Douglass had won repeated acclaim in Britain as an abolitionist speaker, a British reformer wrote to a prominent American abolitionist that Douglass was “a sort of reclaimed wild beast—and … it don’t do to judge him by our civilized rules.”
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As that quotation suggests, Douglass, despite his fame and even as the son of a white father, could not escape the biological heritage of Africa and the cultural heritage of white responses to dark pigmentation of skin.

Given the slavery-based culture of white
dehumanization, a theme of
self-hatred and ambiguous self-esteem runs through African American writing, from the eighteenth century’s
Phillis Wheatley (“Some view our sable race with scornful eye, / Their color is a diabolic die. / Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, / May be refined, and join th’angelic train”) to
James Baldwin and
Toni Morrison. In 1971, Baldwin, who had much earlier asserted that he had been conditioned to “despise” black people, related that racial self-hatred to both animalization and the heritage of slavery:

Toni Morrison has also emphasized that her fictional account of a black girl’s longing for blue eyes was based on “racial self-loathing.” This assertion of racial beauty was definitely not

Following two and a half centuries of American slavery and a century of Jim Crow legal discrimination, conditions did of course improve in significant ways. But even in the mid-1980s, when
Barack Obama began working as a community organizer in South Side Chicago, he discovered that black self-hate was far from being a marginal or exceptional problem—a matter he felt free to describe in his 1995 book,
Dreams from My Father.
Perhaps because Obama had had so little involvement with black communities, a friend impatiently asked, “ ‘What are you surprised about?…That black people still hate themselves?’ ” After analyzing the blacks’ self-destructive symptoms of “color consciousness,” including concern over “good hair, bad hair, thick lips or thin,” and the hostile use of “nigger,” the future president of the United States expressed an understanding of the allure of black
nationalism and the grim reality of “all the black people who, it turned out, shared with me a voice that whispered inside them—‘You don’t really belong here.’ ”