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The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation - Softcover

Davis, David Brion

 
9780307389695: The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307389693 ISBN 13: 9780307389695
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Winner of the  National Book Critics Circle Award 2014


With this volume, Davis presents the age of emancipation as a model for reform and as probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history. Bringing to a close his staggeringly ambitious, prizewinning trilogy on slavery in Western culture Davis offers original and penetrating insights into what slavery and emancipation meant to Americans. He explores how the Haitian Revolution respectively terrified and inspired white and black Americans, hovering over the antislavery debates like a bloodstained ghost. He offers a surprising analysis of the complex and misunderstood significance the project to move freed slaves back to Africa. He vividly portrays the dehumanizing impact of slavery, as well as the generally unrecognized importance of freed slaves to abolition. Most of all, Davis presents the age of emancipation as a model for reform and as probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, and founder and Director Emeritus of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He has written and edited sixteen books, the most recent of which was Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. He is also a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His books have won the Pulitzer Prize, The Bancroft Prize, and the National Book Awards. In 2014 President Obama awarded Davis with the 2013 National Humanities Medal “for reshaping our understanding of history.” He lives outside New Haven, Connecticut.

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1

Some Meanings of Slavery and Emancipation: Dehumanization, Animalization, and Free Soil

God’s first blunder: Man ­didn’t find the animals ­amusing,—­he dominated them, and—­didn’t even want to be an “animal.”  —Nietzsche, Der Antichrist

The Meaning of Animalization, Part I

Traveling through the South in 1856, the famous journalist and landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted remarked to a white overseer that it must be disagreeable to punish slaves the way he did. The overseer replied, “Why, sir, I ­wouldn’t mind killing a nigger more than I would a dog.”

Does this mean that blacks who were treated like animals were literally seen as “only animals,” or as an entirely different species from humans? The answer is clearly no, except perhaps in some extreme cases and for very brief periods of time—­as for example in the ­post-­emancipation lynching era, when many black men accused of raping white women were hanged or tortured, dismembered, and burned alive, occasionally before immense cheering crowds of Southern white men, women, and children.

Degradation and insult are reinforced every day when people call other people curs, pigs, swine, apes, bitches, and sons of bitches, terms which momentarily dehumanize one party while enhancing the ­“non-­animal” superiority of the other. But animalization can cover a spectrum from superficial insult to the justification of slavery and on to lynching and genocide.

Thus the use of such animal metaphors as lice, vermin, microbes, and cockroaches, as in the Nazi Holocaust, lowers the process to a different level, justifying the complete extermination of an impure enemy group that supposedly threatens the basic health of society and therefore has no right to exist. I am mainly concerned here with the psychological and linguistic process, as a way of dealing with the question of whether humans who were treated like animals were ever literally seen as “only animals,” since a discussion of diverse motives would lead us far astray. The world had never seen such an extreme and systematic engine of dehumanization as the Nazi propaganda machine, epitomized by Joseph Goebbels’s assertion in an early speech (March 7, 1942) that “It is a ­life-­or-­death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish microbe. No other government and no other regime would have been able to muster the strength to find a general solution to this issue.” Nearly a year later, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler would expand the point in a speech to SS officers:

Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness. In just the same way, antisemitism, for us, has not been a question of ideology, but a matter of cleanliness, which now will soon have been dealt with. We shall soon be deloused. We have only 20,000 lice left, and then the matter is finished within the whole of Germany.

Given the Nazi example, it is worth noting that the antipode of this animalizing can be seen in a universal tendency to project our potentiality for ­self-­transcendence, freedom, and striving for perfection onto images of kings, dictators, demagogues, and cultural heroes of various kinds. This form of idolatry, which ancient Judaism fortunately singled out as the most dangerous sin facing humanity, can also appear in various kinds of narcissism and ­egocentrism, as when an individual imagines that he is godlike and free from all taint of finitude and corruption.

There is actually a long history to the links between animalization and genocide or ethnic cleansing, and the formula by no means ended with the Nazis. In 1994, when the Hutu slaughtered some 800,000 Tutsi neighbors in Rwanda, the victims were repeatedly likened to inyenizi, or cockroaches.

But were Jews and Tutsis truly seen as nonhumans, as the actual equivalent of microbes, lice, or cockroaches? Given the appalling realities of mass murder, we are intuitively inclined to think yes. Why else would Himmler try to persuade SS officers that their actions would be exactly the same as delousing? Fortunately, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has insightfully clarified this issue as his discussion of ethics moves from social hierarchy to insiders/outsiders and on to genocidal massacres. In accounting for genocide, “the familiar answer” presumes that members of some outgroup are not considered “human at all.” Yet that ­“­doesn’t explain the immense cruelty—­the abominable cruelty,” which is not evident even in the extermination of pests. As Appiah then reasons:

The persecutors may liken the objects of their enmity to cockroaches or germs, but they acknowledge their victim’s humanity in the very act of humiliating, stigmatizing, reviling, and torturing them. Such treatment—­and the voluble justifications the persecutors invariably offer for such treatment—­is reserved for creatures we recognize to have intentions and desires and projects.

Appiah adds in an endnote that the victimizers always “tell you why their victims—­Jews or Aztecs or Tutsi—­deserve ­what’s being done to them.” That was emphatically true of the Nazis, who pictured the Jews not only as an active global threat to civilization throughout history, but in World War II as the hidden conspiratorial force behind both their Soviet and Western enemies. Clearly this retention of a human element fails to make animalization more humane. Quite the contrary.

At this point it should be clear that “dehumanization” means the eradication not of human identity but of those elements of humanity that evoke respect and empathy and convey a sense of dignity. Dehumanization means the debasement of a human, often the reduction to the status of an “animalized human,” a person who exemplifies the ­so-­called animal traits and who lacks the moral and rational capacities that humans esteem. As Appiah implies, this extreme dehumanization deprives the victims even of the kind of sympathy and connectedness often given to Alzheimer patients or those in a coma.

I would only add that since the victims of this process are perceived as “animalized humans,” this double consciousness would probably involve a contradictory shifting back and forth in the recognition of humanity. When Henry Smith, an African American accused of rape, was tortured and killed in 1893 before a Texas mob of some ten thousand whites, many in the crowd no doubt saw him momentarily as “nothing but an animal” as they watched hot irons being pressed on his bare feet and tongue and then into his eyes, and heard him emit “a cry that echoed over the prairie like the wail of a wild animal.” Conversely, we have reports of German soldiers who momentarily recognized the true humanity of individual Jews as they were herded ­toward the gas chambers.

In any event, the creation of “animalized humans” can produce a mental state in the victimizers and spectators that disconnects the neural sources of human identification, empathy, and compassion, the very basis for the Golden Rule and all human ethics. In extreme cases, this means the ability to engage in torture or extermination without a qualm. But the focus on extreme cases can obscure the fact, emphasized by David Livingstone Smith, that “we are all potential dehumanizers, just as we are potential objects of dehumanization.” No doubt many situations arise, especially in war, where people kill or inflict pain without misgivings and without any...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307389693
ISBN 13 
9780307389695
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
448
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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