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The Good Old Days of Slavery
By William Jelani Cobb
http://www.Africana.com
January 9, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/20906/

These days it's getting harder to tell whether history is
repeating itself or if human beings are just becoming more
cliche. This was underscored last week when it came to light
that Cary Christian Academy, a private school in North
Carolina, was using the deceptively titled pamphlet
"Southern Slavery, As It Was" in their curriculum. Among the
more notable claims presented by authors Doug Wilson and
Stephen Wilkins were neglected virtues like: "Many Southern
blacks supported the South because of long established bonds
of affection and trust that had been forged over generations
with their white masters and friends." Or this gem: "There
has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with
such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world."

Listen close and you can almost hear the banjoes strumming
in the background. Officials at the school defended the
43-page tract, arguing that they want to present students
with "both sides" of the Civil War story and that students
also read speeches by Abraham Lincoln.

Ironically enough,
the "both sides" approach does not include the perspectives
of the actual black people who lived through slavery. A
random selection from John Blassingame's "Slave Testimony"
yields this first-person dissenting opinion: "[The mistress]
took her in the morning, before sunrise, into a room and had
all the doors shut. She tied her hands and then took her
frock over her head, and gathered it up in her left hand,
and with her right commenced to beating her naked body with
bunches of willow twigs. She would beat her until her arm
was tired and then thrash her on the floor, and stamp on her
with her foot and kick her and choke her to stop her
screams. She continued the torture until ten o'clock. The
poor child never recovered. A white swelling came from the
bruises on her legs of which she died in two or three years."

Any few pages in your college-worn copy of "The Narrative of
the Life of Frederick Douglass" would put the lie to Wilson
and Wilkins claim that "Slave life was to them a life of
plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good
medical care." And one wonders where Harriet Tubman,
bludgeoned so badly as a child that she suffered from bouts
of narcolepsy for the rest of her life, fits into this
backdrop of happy plantation scenery. And far from
supporting the South out of their "bonds of affection,"
nearly all black Confederates, as James McPherson points out
in "The Negro's Civil War," were conscript laborers who
constantly sought means to escape across Union lines. To put
it simply, this was a case of bondage not bonds. It is
pathetic that five years into the 21st century, the societal
learning curve is so obtuse that we must still make
statements like: American slavery was a violent, oppressive
institution responsible for the brutal subjugation and
dehumanization of millions of people over the course of
three centuries.

Wilson and Wilkins claims that slave life was characterized
by "good medical care" is particularly bizarre given the
fact that enslaved black people were frequently used as
subjects of 19th century medical experimentation. The
historian Katherine Bankole, in fact, pointed out in her
book "Slavery and Medicine" that given the high mortality
rates for the most minor surgeries during the era, doctors
in antebellum Louisiana "perfected" their Caesarian-section
technique on black women before applying it to white ones.

This is not about accurate history, but about providing the
South with a human rights alibi, 139 years past slavery. It
is about a vast capacity for willful self-delusion, the need
to provide self-absolution for the sins of the so-deemed
Peculiar Institution. Thus you see the kind of historical
hairsplitting of "Southern Slavery, As It Was": Slavery was
wrong . . . but not as bad you might think.

And sadly enough, it's not only in the far precincts of the
Christian right that we hear these kinds of weak rationales.
The Southern Alibi tradition rests upon the now -- outmoded
arguments of historian Ulrich B. Phillips' "American Negro
Slavery." First published in 1918, the book glazed the old
arguments that slavery had been a benign and beneficial
institution to the enslaved with a new scholarly sheen.
Phillips' perspective had a striking longevity, finding
expression even in the dissenting works that appeared in the
1950s and 1960s, all the way down to Robert Fogel and
Stanley Engerman's "Time on the Cross" which appeared in
1974 arguing that poor treatment of blacks would have made
slavery unprofitable as an economic institution. Back in my
graduate school days, my friend and fellow historian Khalil
Muhammad and I were amazed to find that we -- and a single
white student -- were the sole voices in a 15-person
colloquium who were willing to argue that slavery was an
unqualified moral wrong.

All these defenses -- whether presented at academic
conferences or passed out to adolescents in private
academies of the far right, are invested in viewing slavery
as a labor system operated by rational, managerial white
folk -- the plantation equivalents of Jack Welch or Lee
Iacocca. But in order for these theories to work, they also
have to overlook the concomitant cruelties of sexual
exploitation of enslaved black women, which was common
enough to be a defining characteristic of the institution.
Again, even a commonplace text like Harriet Jacobs'
"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" or Deborah White's
"Aren't I A Woman" would illustrate the fact that rape was
an intricate part of enslavement in this country. Nor can
these depictions of slavery-lite explain away the
dissolution of families for profit and the inhuman breeding
of blacks to produce additional chattel for the slave owners.

It would be easy to dismiss these disputes as the arid
exercises of the History Forensics Society were the
implications for our everyday lives not so serious. Truth
told, Wilkins and Wilson are only inches away from the
"happy darky" illustrations of black life and if this is
"Southern Slavery, As It Was" then they would be
hard-pressed to explain the literal hundred of slave
revolts, attempted revolts, poisonings and fires that
defined the South between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.
In airbrushing the brutality of slavery, we make it possible
to ignore the tremendous power that race had -- and
continues to have -- in shaping this society. To cut to the
quick, until we are willing to grapple with slavery as it
was, we will remain incapable of dealing with America as it is.

--
Dan Clore

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