What is Slavery?
While I’ve thought about a blog about this many times, I felt some urgency to write it when I heard Jillian Michaels on CNN, and the subsequent response from Nikole Hannah-Jones, which all coincided with Amanda Seales’ Surrounded and my reading of Kellie Carter Jackson’s We Refuse. I write this as I also deeply hear something else they both called out to: the ways in which we (a lot of possible “we”s here so I will say Black people) permit a narrative to get away from us by either allowing others who benefit from the system we’re critiquing to shape the narrative or by allowing a narrative of an individual’s good intentions to override the impact of a system. It’s one of the many reasons why I have a hard time finding a movie on enslavement that I will show in a classroom setting. I am not interested in narratives about the one kind White person who risked it all to provide an enslaved person with basic humanity.
Our current discussion on slavery is focused on its cruelty. It was cruel. I am not refuting that. But, by allowing the discussion to stay focused on cruelty, we allow discussions related to qualifying the cruelty. It becomes discussions of other people’s cruelty, including what was happening in Africa and elsewhere in the New World. We allow arguments that Eric Williams advances when he describes how other groups were enslaved too. It allows arguments about things that could undo the cruelty like learning new skills. But these discussions are (obviously) way off the mark and intentionally doing so. It distracts from the main point—that the modern era is defined by the embeddedness and reliance on enslavement; that there is not an industry in the US that is not touched by dollars from enslavement; that there is not a university or educational system that was not touched by dollars from enslavement; that there is not generational wealth that is untouched by enslavement dollars.
We can see this with individuals. Take the character, Bass, in Twelve Years a Slave. The story is very focused on his kindness as he stands up to the plantation owner and eventually gets word to someone to return Solomon Northup to New York. While kind and he certainly does not own a slave plantation, Bass benefits from enslavement: he is able to easily find work on plantations and earn higher amounts for the same work because he is viewed as “safe.” And he does not risk his own employment at that plantation or any other to get the word out about Solomon. He is has the title of “abolitionist” due to this act but he spends his career working on slave plantations. How does that work?
We can even look at the making of that film and the controversy in Italy. Filmmakers had difficulty marketing a movie with a Black lead, even a movie about enslavement with a Black lead. So the movie poster in Italy features Brad Pitt as Bass, the abolitionist who earned money from slave plantations and Michael Fassbender’s character, an especially cruel plantation owner. While this may seem small, it weighs heavily on me. The priority here is to sell the story, not tell the story, and again demonstrates what system must benefit first.
We can look at the founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson, who when asked about his wealth coming from enslavement, stated that he knew it was wrong, but liked the lifestyle it provided him. I learned of this during a talk from Jeffrey Rosen. Jefferson’s lifestyle was even afforded to him by his own children who he enslaved and did not free until his death.
We can look at higher education. Universities, including those outside of the South, were founded from the proceeds of enslavement. It is so ironic that universities can be built from the proceeds of enslavement but enrolling descendants of enslavement is just too much to do.
This is why it bothers me so much when we have discussions about immigrants and the first point that comes to mind is, if we deport too many, our economy will suffer. This is true; I am not disagreeing. But this should be an indicator that we are still reliant on cheap labor, where people can become billionaires off the backs, minds, and patronage of people who are given just enough to keep buying from them.
Every once in a while, I ask students what had to happen in order for their coffee or orange juice to cost what it costs. They quickly come to the conclusion that there is no way that the land, labor, transportation, or even the wages from the person who sold it to them comes close to covering the actual costs. They quickly understand that a lot of people had to go without in order for them to go with. And this is the system that is being critiqued, not whether they paid the extra quarter for the fair trade version or gave a hefty tip to the person serving the food. The system still exists.
So what is slavery? It’s not just cruelty. It’s not just a moral failing of individuals long gone. It is a foundational system-economic, educational, political-that still shapes who gets to have and who is told to wait. When we focus only on the cruelty, we risk centering feelings instead of structure. We allow for apologetics, for exceptionalism, for convenient myths about kindness on plantations or bootstrap narratives built on the backs of unpaid labor.
Slavery is infrastructure. It’s in the walls. It’s in the balance sheets. It’s in the generational wealth that compounds, and in the generational struggle that persists. And unless we are willing to name it as such, not just in the past but in its afterlives, we’ll keep mistaking fair-trade stickers and good intentions for justice. And we’ll keep letting the story get away from us.
