📜 Considering Intent: Slavery Wasn't Built In A Day
Last Updated: 3 months, 2 weeks ago
The human history of slavery is something I've started (properly) learning about recently and is a topic that has been on my mind a lot lately, as something which many Christian apologists want to debate with skeptics and to rationalise, due to it being sanctioned in numerous places throughout the Bible.
This started with realising how often Matt Dillahunty of call-in show The Atheist Experience receives arguments attempting to justify slavery, given that the Bible explicitly sanctions it, and thus a lot of Christians who take a literalist and divinely-inspired-for-teaching perspective tend to find this a stumbling block, something that needs to be rationalised away in some form order to preserve the God-is-all-loving-and-all-knowing belief.
Since the sanctioning of slavery is so explicit in both testaments, it's unsurprising that there will inevitably be Christians who argue that slavery is "not so bad" or that this was not "true" slavery.
On a skeptical secularist debate channel with progressive leanings, this argument goes down about as well as you can imagine.
Then, I suppose, the Youtube algorithm took over in recommending me more explanation videos about historical slavery, and that's how I discovered the video I will be talking about in a moment.
Before we get deep into that I wanted to share a surprising short on how Rome was built using slavery but how Rome also suffered due to it - as the use of slavery actually created its own economic problems.
Roman title reference now acknowledged, I am not actually talking about Roman slavery in this article. (That's right! Misdirection! But was it the Romans that made you scroll this far? What about more modern slavery makes it a less comfortable topic than in the ancient world? Is it the implications of what it says about us? This is a thought I am hoping you will keep in the back of your mind as you hopefully read further.)
The slavery I want to talk about of course the enslavement of African people in the USA's shockingly recent history.
Crash course Economics mentions in this course video's introduction how US slavery too was an economic issue. Using the labour of enslaved people was cheap, which was a major reason it took so long to be *somewhat** abolished in the USA.
And though this conversation is not discussing economics directly, it is a driving factor in a conversation talking about the retroactive justification of human rights atrocities, performed for (certain privileged people's) comfort and convenience back in the day ... which current justification is also for the sake of (the same certain privileged people's) current comfort and convenience. The undercurrent of that justification today is the same as the justification back then : let nothing change - this works for us.
How Slavery in the USA is Discussed ... and Avoided
Slavery tends to be eagerly dismissed from or taboo within conversation, as staying too long on it tends to evoke defensiveness (by white people) in the USA, just as talking about the atrocities of Apartheid tends to invoke defensiveness by white people in South Africa ("Apartheid is over now, it's been twenty-something years!").
With the tendency to dismiss human rights violations by sociopolitical or socioeconomic groups we might be part of as an uncomfortable topic, there is pressure to rather give the benefit of the doubt and assume that the majority of white people living in those times who enslaved people weren't that bad.
There is a consequence to this dismissal however, in that it then becomes easy to think of slavery as something which "just happened" as part of power shifts in history, where the powerful gained way too much power over the powerless and abused it through lack of accountability as if the process of such violations is simply inevitable, universal and osmotic.
There's often even an idealisation of those times, the implications that enslaved people were happy, in a Song of The South kind of way.
One can be tempted to see those who empowered the system as enslavers as simply cavalier and unaware of the harm - they're certainly often glorified in history and through infamous statues even today.
It's tempting to try to remove the too-close-to-being-like-us perpetrators of those crimes and their identities and privilege entirely and dismiss human decisions as some natural phenomenon, to even be fatalistic "Yeah, humans have always done terrible things to other humans, particularly the ones in power. Power corrupts. It's terrible what can happen when there's no accountability."
Or to rationalise as we try to relate our own experiences - even if we have no relatable experience to the victims - to how such atrocities could have happened, which is what my brain often leans towards in processing my own past trauma from my parents. "It's amazing what we're understanding now thanks to psychology and just how trauma affects the body. Previous generations didn't understand how harmful this type of abuse was... maybe this helps explain why my parents were so harsh with me. Maybe systemic oppression comes from a similar lack of understanding of other cultures and just like humans in general struggle to relate to people who aren't from our in-group. If people had had this understanding and digital connectedness we have now back then maybe there'd be more empathy!"
These attempts of our brains to resolve difficult realities into something that fits a more comfortable narrative - whether for us personally or for those we interact with - serve to undermine the reality of the situation, and to even retroactively justify it.
The Truth is Not Always Comfortable
I myself have heard only the most basic overview of the history of slavery in the USA, which ignorance might be at least somewhat justifiable in that I am not from the USA, but I still feel is sufficient to know that nobody (or at least nobody given any non-horrific alternative) would have wanted to be enslaved.
But the specific details of why slaves were brought over to the USA on ships, as well as the chattel treatment on their 6+week voyage broke the suspension of disbelief I didn't realise I was holding.
Something in this video - which I will get into in a moment, sparked the realisation of how intentional it was, as J. Draper explains in her video below.
In this video I am referencing, J. Draper, a tour guide, answers common questions she gets from white people about slavery and debunks myths such as that of Irish slavery in the USA.
Tour guide J. Draper answers common questions she gets from white people about slavery.
That something was this:
That the white people who enslaved African people had attempted to enslave Native American people and been unsuccessful, because those people had been able to escape and find help in their own country.
That was the reason the kidnappers brought in slaves from another country, across the ocean.
The reason was to make sure enslaved people would not know where they were, would not have help or any way home or to find their families if they tried to get away.
Pause.
Somehow, even though I know slavery of African American people involved literal kidnapping and selling of humans as possessions, that is what really stuck with me.
They made voyages on ships - voyages which took months, and which took time in between to plan, time to resupply, time repair ships - long voyages to round people up and take them to a different country, to make sure that they couldn't escape.
That level of intentionality and planning and the time that went into it is not something that just happens. This wasn't some kind of "slip up".
When you find yourself trying to justify the lengths that a group of people went to keep other people as property, no matter how much those people did not want to be property, and the amount of thought and effort that had to go into ensuring those enslaved people didn't escape, and to try to ensure they lost all hope of ever trying to get home to their families, and the fact that these people were kept, for years and years, that slavery continued for centuries, yes actual centuries from 1619 to 1865 (and beyond)**.
Maybe just stop.
* The 13th amendment's "prison loophole" means anyone can still be enslaved if convicted of a crime.
** Abolition didn't end instantaneously with the new laws.
Thanks for reading! Subscribe to my free newsletter or follow my RSS feed!