Content area
Full Text
IT IS A COMMONPLACE to say that slavery "dehumanized" enslaved people, but to do so is misleading, harmful, and worth resisting.
I hasten to add that there are, of course, plenty of right-minded reasons for adopting the notion of "dehumanization." It is hard to square the idea of millions of people being bought and sold, of systematic sexual violation, natal alienation, forced labor, and starvation with any sort of "humane" behavior: these are the sorts of things that should never be done to human beings. But by terming these actions "inhuman" and suggesting that they either relied upon or accomplished the "dehumanization" of enslaved people, we are participating in a sort of ideological exchange that is no less baleful for being so familiar. We are separating a normative and aspirational notion of humanity from the sorts of exploitation and violence that history suggests may well be definitive of human beings: we are separating ourselves from our own histories of perpetration. To say so is not to suggest that there is no difference between the past and the present; it is merely that we should not overwrite the complex determinations of history with simple-minded notions of moral progress.
More important, though, is the ideological work accomplished by holding on to a normative sense of "humanity"-one that can be separated from the "inhuman" actions of so many humans. Historians sometimes argue that some aspects of slavery were so violent, so obscene, so "inhuman" that, in order to live with themselves, the perpetrators had to somehow "dehumanize" their victims. While that "somehow" remains a problem-it is never really specified what combination of unconscious, cultural, and social factors make a "somehow"-I question the assumption that slaveholders had to first "dehumanize" their slaves before they could swing a baby by the feet into a post to silence its cries, or jam the broken handle of a hoe down the throat of a field hand, or refer to their property as "darkies" or "hands" or "wool."
This language of "dehumanization" is misleading because slavery depended upon the human capacities of enslaved people. It depended upon their reproduction. It depended upon their labor. And it depended upon their sentience. Enslaved people could be taught: their intelligence made them valuable. They could be...