The American Scar: Slavery
Not surprised at all about the riot zone
And I moan
This was predicted not self-inflicted
By the rapp outta the hood
Who gettin' voted mayor
Lookin' at em wit' an evil eye (why lie)
Politikin' who stickin' it better watch their backs"
(Public Enemy. "Tie Goes To the Runner." Fear of a Black Planet, Chaos
recordings, 1990)
"This is not a story to pass on." (Morrison, Toni. "Beloved", 1987.)
I've discovered the real roots of America these past few days and decided that writing
about it was better than killing an
innocent victim to soothe the hostility I feel towards my heritage. I picked up a pen
because it was safer than a gun. This was a
valuable lesson I've learned from my forefathers, who did both. Others in my country react
on instinct and choose not to
deliberate the issue as I have. If they are black, they are imprisoned or dead. As The
People vs. Simpson storms through its
ninth month, the United States awaits the landmark decision that will determine justice.
O.J. Simpson would not have had a
chance in 1857. Racial segregation, discrimination, and degradation are no accidents in
this nation's history. The loud tribal beat
of pounding rap rhythm is no coincidence. They stem logically from the legacy the Founding
Fathers bestowed upon
contemporary America with regard to the treatment of African-Americans, particularly the
black slave woman. This tragedy
has left the country with a weak moral foundation.
The Founding Fathers, in their conception of a more perfect union, drafted ideas that
communicated the oppression they felt as
slaves of Mother England. Ironically, nowhere in any of their documents did they address
the issue of racial slavery. The
Declaration of Independence from England was adopted as the country's most fundamental
constitutional document. It was the
definitive statement for the American policy of government, of the necessary conditions
for the exercise of political power, and
of the sovereignty of the people who establish the government. John Hancock, president of
the Continental Congress and slave
trader, described it as "the Ground & Foundation of a future government."
James Madison, Father of the Constitution and
slave owner, called it "the fundamental Act of Union of these States." "All
men are created equal," and endowed by the Creator
with the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness." They either meant that all men were created equal,
that every man was entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or they did not
mean it at all.
The Declaration of Independence was a white man's document that its author rarely applied
to his own or any other slave.
Thomas Jefferson suspected blacks were inferior. These suspicions, together with his
prophecy that free blacks could not
harmoniously co-exist with white men for centuries to come, are believed to be the primary
reasons for his contradictory
actions toward the issue of slavery. At the end of the eighteenth century, Jefferson
fought the infamous Alien & Sedition Acts,
which limited civil liberties. As president, he opposed the Federalist court, conspiracies
to divide the union, and the economic
plans of Alexander Hamilton. Throughout his life, Thomas Jefferson, hypocrite, slave
holder, pondered the conflict between
American freedom and American slavery. He bought and sold slaves; he advertised for
fugitives; he ordered disciplinary lashes
with a horse whip. Jefferson understood that he and his fellow slave holders benefited
financially and culturally from the sweat
of their black laborers. One could say he regarded slavery as a necessary evil. In 1787,
he wrote the Northwest Ordinance
which banned slavery in territory acquired from Great Britain following the American
Revolution. However, later as a retired
politician and ex-president, Jefferson refused to free his own slaves, counseled young
white Virginia slave holders against
voluntary emancipation of theirs, and even favored the expansion of slavery into the
western territories. To Jefferson,
Americans had to be free to worship as they desired. They also deserved to be free from an
overreaching government. To
Jefferson, Americans should also be free to possess slaves.
In neither of the Continental Congresses nor in the Declaration of Independence did the
Founding Fathers take an unequivocal
stand against black slavery. Obviously, human bondage and human dignity were not as
important to them as their own political
and economic independence. It was not an admirable way to start a new nation. The
Constitution created white privilege while
consolidating black bondage. It didn't matter that more than 5,000 blacks had joined in
the fight for independence only to
discover real freedom didn't apply to them. Having achieved their own independence, the
patriots exhibited no great concern to
extend the blessings of liberty to those Americans with black skin. Black people were
thought of as inferior beings, animals.
"You can manage ordinary niggers by lickin' em and by given' em a taste of hot iron
once in a while when they're extra ugly,"
one uncouth white owner was heard to say at a slave auction shortly before the Civil War.
"But if a nigger ever sets himself up
against me, I can't never have any patience with him. I just get my pistol and shoot him
right down; and that's the best way."
Certainly the formal doctrines of the country didn't apply to animals.
If the "animals" were excluded from the rights of the people, then naturally it
followed that they didn't deserve justice. Dred
Scott vs. Sanford stands as one of the most important cases in the history of the United
States Supreme Court. Most of the
literature deals with the controversial final decision, rendered on March 6, 1857, by
Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney. "Once
free always free" became maybe once free but now back to work, nigger. This case was
a prime example of how even the
American judicial system failed when faced with volatile and substantive racial issues.
Dred Scott was declared to be still a
slave for several reasons. 1) Although blacks could be citizens of a given state, they
could not be and were not citizens of the
United States with the right to sue in the federal courts. In other words,
"animals" couldn't sue a fellow countryman. 2) Aside
from not having the right to sue in the first place, Scott was still a slave because he
never had been free to begin with. Owning
slaves was protected by the Constitution at the time, and Congress exceeded its authority
when it passed legislation forbidding
or abolishing slavery in the territories. The Missouri Compromise was such an exercise of
unconstitutional authority and was
accordingly declared invalid. So, "animals" were the white man's property by
authority of the doctrines passed down by the
Founding Fathers. 3) Whatever status the slave may have had while he was in a free state
or territory, if he voluntarily returned
to a slave state, his status there depended upon the law of that slave state as
interpreted by its own courts. In Scott's case,
since the Missouri high court had declared him to be still a slave, that was the status
and law which the Supreme Court of the
United States would accept and recognize. In other words, in the middle of the nineteenth
century, "animals" better just keep
their mouth shut and work if they knew what was good for them.
What was good for them was making the master rich. The good Reverend Jesse H. Turner of
Virginia shifted from a Richmond
pulpit to a nearby plantation and explained his prosperity by saying "I keep no
breeding woman nor brood mare. If I want a
Negro I buy him already raised to my hand, and if I want a horse or a mule I buy him
also...I think it cheaper to buy than to
raise. At my house, therefore, there are no noisy groups of mischievous young Negroes to
feed, nor are there any flocks of
young horses to maintain." (Farmers' Register X, 129. March, 1842) Whether it were
cheaper to "breed" or to buy slaves
depended upon the market price at the time. Slave children were a by-product that could
hardly be controlled and whose cost
had no relation to market price. Often a woman for sale was described as a "good
breeder". New-born "pickaninnies" had a
value purely because at some day their labor would presumably yield more than the cost of
their keep. The sex of the child was
generally irrelevant as most slave women did the same labor as men. Slave women cut down
trees and hauled the logs in
leather straps attached to their shoulders. They plowed using mule and ox teams. They dug
ditches, spread manure, and piled
coarse fodder with their bare hands. They built and cleaned Southern roads, helped
construct Southern railroads, and, of
course, they picked cotton. In short, slave women were used as badly as men, and were
treated by Southern whites as if they
were anything but self-respecting women. From the black women who were even partially
literate, hundreds of letters exist
telling of the atrocities inflicted by "massa." Both physical and sexual
assaults on black women were common at the turn of the
century.
Nothing I have read captures the true devastation to the spirit of the black woman during
the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries like Toni Morrison's "Beloved." Sethe, the main character, is the
iron-willed, iron-eyed survivor of slavery at Sweet
Home, where one white youth held her down while another sucked out her breast milk and
lashed her with cowhide while her
husband helplessly watched. Once her owner discovers the location she and her children
have escaped to, she takes them to
the back-yard barn to murder them and forever keep them free from the unbearable life of
slavery. She is discovered after
killing her infant daughter and taken to jail. In a heart-wrenching passage, we learn that
her reason for committing the infanticide
was "that anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind.
Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty
you. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up...Whites might
dirty her all right, but not her best thing,
her beautiful, magical best thing...She might have to work the slaughterhouse yard, but
not her daughter. And no one, nobody
on this earth, would list her daughter's characteristics on the animal side of the paper.
No. Oh no." (251)
The whole question of how to love in an inhuman system which breeds children like horses
results in inhumane choices. This
theme, Morrison carries throughout the novel. For women like Ella whose "puberty was
spent in a house where she was shared
by father and son, whom she called the lowest yet.' It was the lowest yet' who gave her a
disgust for sex and against whom she
measured all atrocities,"(256) nature mercifully quenches the life from the
"white hairy thing," the freakish offspring from this
monstrous childhood assault. For Morrison's women, sexuality is the reward and burden of
their gender. The unlikelihood that
any female slave could survive sexual abuse, lashing, thirst, hunger, and childbirth, yet
continue to form milk to suckle is
Morrison's comment on Sethe's determination, and a tribute to the countless black women
who were victimized by the evil of
the white man.
That the white man committed evil there is no question. The letters of the past reveal
countless lives that were ruined or ended
because of racial slavery. Our forefathers had no virtues when it required compassion for
African-Americans. One cannot
speak of morality in terms of active or passive--there simply was no morality concerning
slavery. We as a people today must
exist in a country that was handed-down, literally, by hypocrites. For over two hundred
years, the leaders of our country
eagerly allowed the oppression for which they established the country to escape. How can
we as descendants of those people
view the past and honestly feel a sense of morality for the country?
To deal with our past realistically, it is necessary to view the early leaders in their
own terms: as frail, fallible human beings. We
could have admired them for many things: their courage and bravery in the military
struggle against Britain; their creativity in
forging a new government; and their service to a cause that captured the imagination of
people around the world. However, it is
impossible to admire the hypocritical Founding Fathers of this nation for betraying the
very ideals to which they gave lip service.
It is impossible to admire our early leaders for speaking eloquently at one moment for the
brotherhood of man and in the next
moment denying it to the black brothers and sisters who fought by their side and bled for
their profit. It is forever impossible to
admire the thousands of white settlers of America in light of the degrading treatment of
the human spirit, for considering "the
labor of a breeding woman as no object, and that a child raised every two years is of more
profit than the crop of the best
laboring man." (Jefferson, Thomas. "The American Nation." p. 352) The
concern here is not for the harm that the Fathers did
to the cause which they claimed to serve as for the harm that their moral legacy has left
for every generation of their progeny.
Didn't they realize the effect their actions would have on the growing nation? Didn't they
know the black slave would not
behave like a well trained dog forever? After reading the facts, one can only speculate
that, no, neither did they realize nor did
they care about the misfortune of the black race. They were profiting from the degradation
of a whole race of people, and that
was the driving force behind the cracking whip. Having created a flawed revolutionary
doctrine and a Constitution that did not
bestow the blessings of liberty to its posterity, the stage was set for every succeeding
generation of Americans to apologize,
compromise and criticize the principles of liberty that were supposed to be the foundation
of our system of government and our
way of life. Abraham Lincoln, the celebrated president who "honorably" put an
end to black slavery in America, shared his true
motives in a letter addressed to Horace Greeley on August 22, 1862: "I would save the
Union. I would save it the shortest way
under the Constitution...If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could
at the same time destroy slavery, I
do not agree with them... What I do about slavery and the colored race I do because I
believe it helps to save this Union."
I now relate with the anger in the voices of many contemporary rap artists. I now see why
certain black men look at white men
with anger in their eyes. I now understand why I was punched in the face by an unknown
black youth one day a few years ago
as I walked out of a Safeway supermarket. His one comment to me as he ran off was,
"Sorry, man. I just hate white people."
So do I, my brother. Now, so do I.
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