"I admit I am sickened at the purchase of slaves, but I must be mumm, for how could we do without sugar or rum?"
-- William Cowper, 1788
All of us like to hold onto our illusions.
Most of us like to believe ourselves big-hearted and fair, the sorts who stand up to bullies and mostly do the right thing, even when it's difficult. All of us can justify ourselves to ourselves.
We like to think our accomplishments are our own, that we have earned whatever we have accumulated. No one gave us anything, did they? Other than food and shelter and maybe a college education and help with the down payment. Maybe a stint in rehab or an introduction to the head of sales.
Maybe when we're alone and honest with ourselves we admit how lucky we've been that there were people there to help us. Maybe we even begin to suspect luck is the single biggest determinant of success.
OK, the harder you work, the luckier you get. Sure, dude. That's a hard illusion to shake, because you know how hard you've worked. But some, for instance, have reservoirs of family wealth built up over generations, and some are born with less than nothing. Black folks--some of whom were forcibly uprooted from their homes and brought to this country as slaves--didn't have an opportunity to accumulate capital for much of the 20th century, and there's plenty of evidence, such as the disparity between black and white unemployment rates, that racism is still an important factor. If you don't see that, then you're probably a beneficiary of the socio-economic status quo. You're privileged. Like me.
That's the way the world works. We all have our circumstances, and none of us can help where we came from. None of us owned slaves; none of us were slaves. But all of us are the product of a civilization that for a significant part of its history embraced an obvious evil because of economic expediency. Slavery is foundational to our world.
You might not want to believe that. You might prefer to believe a lot of things other than the truth--that slaves were happy in their servitude, or that they were better off than they would have been in Africa, or that the fact that Africans participated in the slave trade somehow mitigates the crime.
And there's no doubt that they did--some tribes grew rich by trafficking in their enemies. "I believe there is a great psychic shadow over Africa, and it has much to do with our guilt and denial of our role in the slave trade," former Ghanaian ambassador to the U.N. Kofi Awoonor wrote in 1994. "We, too, are blameworthy in what was essentially one of the most heinous crimes in human history."
But just because all human beings can be corrupted by greed doesn't mean the tiki torchers and rebel flag wavers have a point. It doesn't matter whether your ancestors owned slaves or not--slavery was America's original sin.
You might argue that people didn't know any better then, and it's fair to point out that people in the 18th century didn't have all the advantages we have. For one thing, we can look back at the history of the 18th century and see what people were writing and saying at the time. Thomas Jefferson, for one, called slavery "an abominable crime," "moral depravity" and a "hideous blot." He certainly knew it was wrong; at the time of the Revolution he was working on abolitionist legislation.
But he owned nearly 200 slaves. (Including Sally Hemmings, about whom we should hold no romantic notions. She was Jefferson's slave, not his lover.)
Jefferson's problem with ending slavery was practical--he didn't think emancipation would succeed unless slave owners voluntarily undertook it. And he thought freeing slaves on American soil would be disastrous, as the former slaves would no doubt rise up to murder their former masters. So they had to be transported out of the country before the shackles came off.
It was a hard problem.
So our Constitution did not ban it, even though by the late 18th century anti-slavery sentiment was running high in western cultures. William Cowper, the British poet whose ironic words are quoted above, published "The Negro's Complaint" (a poem often cited by Martin Luther King Jr.) in 1788, the same year his countryman William Roscoe published his epic (nearly 90-page) poem "The Wrongs of Africa," which was commissioned by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, in part to answer Rev. Raymond Harris' pamphlet "Scriptural Researches on the Licitness of the Slave Trade" which argued that there was much scriptural evidence in support of slavery.
Which means it was a debate. Which means some people wanted to hang on to their illusions and believe black people were not real people because it was economically expedient to do so.
Which shouldn't surprise us because people generally do what they want to do--what's easiest, or most profitable--and figure out a rationale for it later.
The truth is, to be a good person you have to pay a price, even if that price is only recognizing that you didn't do it all by yourself, that you've had lots of help and good fortune.
There is a real danger in identity politics; we don't want to split our nation into tribes concerned primarily with the advancement of the bloc. (We don't want a country split into Red and Blue camps where everyone shouts like anonymous Internet commenters.) We don't want a balkanized America; mongrelization is important to the American experiment. Miscegenation is the world's great hope.
We want all types, people from all over, different cultures, different colors. That's the point. Nativism is essentially anti-Americanism. We need to be revitalized by new ideas. We ought to be a magpie culture, quick to claim everything fun and shiny and useful for the betterment of life.
I have no problem with cultural appropriation so long as it's respectful of its sources--Robert Johnson and Louis Armstrong and Muhammad Ali and Maya Angelou belong to America. Anybody can access whatever they need for inspiration. Just don't imagine the past has nothing to do with you.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 02/06/2018