Race in America: Colonial Slavery and Social Redress

Intro to the Series

Hey all, in the spirit of working in public, I also wanted to share the directed research I’ve been doing with Prof. Jim Campbell, from Stanford’s history department. He famously teaches History of South Africa, which I took in the Winter, just before COVID hit the US. That class made me realize that history has a very interesting power to “denaturalize” things we take for granted.

A great example Prof. Campbell gave me of this power is the “Chicago house”. Most of us in America will recognize the standard construction of homes here, with 2-by-4s neatly spaced a few inches apart, made of that same, pale beige wood. If you trace its history, that form of “skeleton construction” has very specific roots in the available resources and construction needs of Chicago at the time, and seems to derive from the construction of the first skyscrapers. Around the world and through history, method is clearly not the norm (red-brick homes in London, Pueblo cities carved into rock formations, smoothed mud floors and walls in north Indian villages, …) but any American could tell you that’s how homes are made.

In Professor Campbell’s class, I saw this same process of historical analysis and denaturalization applied to the construction of race. For the first time, I could concretely visualize what the world might have looked like without this socio-economic construction. I now noticed more clearly how we lace our culture with story-telling that reinforces these structures at every turn. Although I am a computer scientist by training, I knew this would be an indispensable tool for becoming a more thoughtful, perceptive, and effective citizen of the world.

Intro to Weeks 1 and 2

My interest was to continue applying this historian’s mindset to understand Race and Politics in America. In particular, I wanted to understand how we have waves of continued discrimination and violence even after many generations of work to improve the law and social expectations. I suspected two patterns would be important to understand: what happened to the white supremacists who lost battles against abolition or civil rights, and how did media story-telling interact with the politics of those times?

Prof. Campbell and I decided to start way back with Colonial Slavery. I started with reading the report from the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. This was the first such investigation in the US, investigating the institution’s (and Rhode Island’s) historical role in the slave trade and slavery. I also read an overview on the issues of reparations and reconciliation after crimes against humanity more generally. (A more thorough bibliography can be found at the end.)

Below is an annotated version of my reading memo to Prof. Campbell, outlining my reactions and questions from the text.

Memo 1

The way policy dictated one thing and people did another in practice, tying slavery ever deeper into society and even normalizing it to the slave masters reminded me a lot of the political economy of South Africa, especially from the construction of the Bantustans to the end of Apartheid.

Colonial Rhode Island banned the slave trade pretty early on, but they were routinely circumvented by merchants through widespread, blatant corruption. The government made no attempt to enforce the rules, a pattern repeated for later resolutions against slavery as well.

An aspect of the slave owners’ worldview I don’t understand is how they squared the ideal of a kind Northern slave owner, or outlawing the slave trade, with the widespread mockery of abolition and disregard for freed slaves. My first hypothesis would be that maybe there was a popular negative reaction to these changes as common white folk were made equal in some ways to former slaves. However, the rich and powerful members of the legislature, subverted the legal changes themselves. So who were the people in government trying to please if the public was against stopping slavery and so were business interests? Was it the church?

Humans have been engaging in slavery for millennia, so the historically interesting question is not why America engaged in slavery, but what caused the world to slowly turn against the practice during that and following centuries. Prof. Campbell proposed that the rise of capitalism, while exacerbating slavery through the economic incentives it condoned, also raised questions about the legitimacy of unpaid labor. Capitalism frames labor such that employers pay wages as a fair return to market participants. However, slaves have no such agency to participate in such a market, so where did they fit in this worldview? Prompting the need for justification then systematically brought attention to all the other evils of slavery as we think of it today. I think this is an interesting possibility, but I have yet to investigate it more fully myself, and I would think there were other historical trends at play as well.

The politics of manumission was another striking feature of both pre-emancipation America and the modern US for me. In Slavery and Social Death, Patterson brings up the idea of gift giving as a core component of elevating the status of a former slave. For me, this seems to correlate strongly with the idea of reparations. In order to bring someone who has been enslaved to the status of a free person in the eyes of the incumbent citizens, their repression needs to be negated and repented for in front of/by the public. The idea of exchange between the slave and slave owner is really interesting here. For example, Patterson mentions ritual gifts of weapons, pigs, or new shoes to freed slaves, or freeing ceremonies being witnessed by the whole village and being held at cross-roads.

After further reading of Patterson, I don’t really stand by the argument made above, because the degradation of the former slave was never really washed away after manumission in many of these cases. However, I still think some sort of recognition is important, just not sufficient for rectifying the skewed social structure of a slave-holding society.

As I’ll discuss at the end, I’m hesitant to ascribe much importance to symbolic logic, because I think it is very easy to fall prey to cognitive biases in doing so, however, I think Patterson’s point, for the need of unequal material but equal symbolic exchange makes sense. In particular, I’m willing to bet there is interesting psychology, regarding our bias towards saying no to change or limbic predisposition to anger (to protect family and community), that can explain how white America (but also others across the world) resist attempts to remove repressive structures so violently. By taking analysis to the level of biology, I feel like it would be hard to demonize the other side, which might help generate reconciliation and progress.

We may really be asking the brain to reconnect to basic neural wiring for empathy that has been eroded by decades of normalizing the treatment of fellow humans as commodities or, in our case, stereotypes and socioeconomic suffering. Caring for others is so innately human that we have special neurons connecting our eyes to the amygdala which help us understand the emotions of other people. We actually can’t consciously control these responses and they make us physiologically mimic the person in distress (mirror neurons). This is such a strong force that babies seeing another child getting hurt actually think they’ve been injured ourselves. In many ways, our capacity to inflict harm on each other seems so biologically strange that I think it is worth considering the history of slavery and the evolution of slave societies from this lens. The idea of constructing an “other” is probably extremely relavant here.

As an aside, and AM NOT equating the two, but I wonder if the apathy slavers developed can be modeled biologically by how people eat meat after seeing the conditions of livestock, or being wasteful with water or energy while understanding the global warming guillotine hanging over our heads. Knowing that I can be a culprit of both, humanizes the actions of slaveholders and American politicians for me. I find this very scary, but it may also be a step in the right direction, especially because these same mechanisms are probably in play with current anti-BLM and anti-Asian violence.

Something else that kept hitting me through this reading is a feeling that too much intellectual breathing room is being given to the arguments of those against re-examining these histories or even considering various forms of reparations (like HR-40). Please look this bill up, I am shocked that this has never even seen the house floor. Opposition arguments tended to feel like post-hoc rationalizations of gut feelings to me. This may be because I’ve yet to read some of the authors referenced in the report in more detail, but having worked and volunteered in some of the communities affected by this legacy in the US today, I find it really hard to swallow the view that no government redress is needed.

Related to this, I am also curious if there is any work on the neurobiology of assuming responsibility for something, especially if you are not taking responsibility for yourself, but for someone else. I think this might shed light on the paradox of how governments can be so hard pressed to express regret for past wrongs, while also maintaining that they have little connection to the perpetrators. Additionally, for the victims and their descendants, it might explain how the power relations emerging from such oppression can live on past the initial wrongdoing, through the mindset and behavior of descendants.

I think it’s plausible that such a mechanism exists based on Prof. Sapolsky’s online lectures on Human Behavioral Biology. There is a section where he describes, from bats to monkeys, and clearly humans, mammals seem to have been very strongly selected to evolve social memory that internalizes rings of hierarchy and familial/clan relationships.

For me, this is also further reason for why reparations and symbolic gestures are still important for the legacy of Slavery today. Reshaping the cultural stories around these events changes the power structures we internalize, not just in conscious thought, but even in the emotions that we are not actively aware of. I think this is the same mechanism by which kids of my generation can go from making gay jokes as 9 year olds to being advocates for LBGTQ+ and BIPOC representation in the organizations that we work for as adults.

Clearly making such comments at the expense of others was never a good thing, just as slavery once existing does not legitimize slaveholders’ actions during that period. However, I mean to illustrate that social attitudes that are so pervasive as to be picked up by children can be reversed with deliberate work to change social narratives.

I also found the section on litigation for reparations, as well as against other anti-Black legislation, incredibly frustrating to read. This part of our history really leaves me incredulous and bewildered. I guess it is an extension of the John vs Moses (Brown, yes of Brown University) struggle, but on the scale of the whole nation, with two steps forward and one (sometimes three) steps back. I am curious, however, if, like the Civil Liberties Act, framing the need for government redress for slavery in terms of broader social progress and cooperation might help.

Other Texts I Read:

Emotional Intelligence, Goleman 1994:

Book introducing the idea of emotional intelligence, a brief survey of key scientific results that have shaped our understanding of emotion, and ways to act on thisknowledge/incorporate it into education.

Slavery and justice: We seek to discover the meaning of our past, Simmons 2004

“Public discourse in the United States … is so saturated with emotional venting, name-calling and one-sided statements that fewer and fewer people are willing to discuss serious ideas in an open setting.” I just loved how predictive this line was of the last 5–6 years.

Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Patterson 1985 (Intro and Chapter on Manumission)

We “eschew what seems too paradoxical” — on slavery being a “peculiar” institution, “when it is anything other than peculiar in human history”

American slavery can trace the development of its system to the middle ages.

I found it strange that “advanced societies” usually had much more restrictive and elaborate systems of slavery.

Slaves have been manumitted for war since the time of Vikings — seems very similar to the Emancipation Proclamation.

Further questions:

What were community centers for organized resistance to things like the civil rights movement? What is the process by which hateful national histories are rewritten (like violence of Scots-Irish, or discrimination against Italian people)?

How do people accommodate such different moral requirements on reparations outside the US, vs domestically? Is these just details of political machinations that normal people don’t care about, but matter in negotiating IR stuff?

History of “the essential rectitude of American institutions”, how does this compare to countries where this is not the case?

Are there ways in which the impact of historical re-discovery of events can be traced to social change? →treating this methodology as a falsifiable policy for improvement over time. Also would be interesting to characterize time-scale of change needed for different ideas.

This concept of Sovereign Immunity seems crazy. The government is elected by and run by human beings, who all are making choices about what to do. It makes sense that this might clog the court/otherwise frivolous litigation might take hold. However, that seems like a problem worth solving imo.

Why does commodification of labor open up their minds in such a society-wrenching way? How do you go from barter systems to wage/paid labor? It seems to me that slavery must exist because the conditions of the labor required to make such businesses profitable requires a fictitious human status modeled around a loss of freedom.

What causes the human need for justification? Why do we need to justify a system based on how we would feel if made to swap places? Hypothesis: this trains a pattern of thinking that can be revisited to override the empathetic response to another’s suffering.