THOMAS LARSON

(The Truth Seeker September, 2023)

1 / Before the Florida Department of Education issued its curriculum directive this past summer that slavery in the United States produced “personal benefits” for the enslaved in the form of a well-stocked resumé of trades, useful after Emancipation in 1863, the board members might have consulted a seminal document in the literature of the oppressed—Angela Davis’s 1971 essay, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.”

These days we’ve rightly exchanged the conditional designation, “slave,” for enslaved person. Fifty years ago, Davis prophesized this nominative shift; she cataloged how Black women resisted the shackles. Among the first scholars to gather the evidence, she argued that a woman (daughter, mother, wife) was equal to a man in undermining the slaveholder, surreptitiously and openly, at her peril. “If she was burned, hanged, broken on the wheel, her head paraded on poles before her brothers and sisters, she must have also felt the wedge of this counter-insurgence as a fact of her daily existence.”

Where did the woman’s skill in improvising defiance using wiles and deceit come from? Obviously, such resistance wasn’t taught by any master or wife and was not read to her from a chapter on treachery in the McGuffey Reader. Her refusal to kowtow lies in the organic ingenuity and duplicity oppressed people adopt. Any “personal benefit” was invented on the spot by and for her, her family, and her community.

According to Davis, here’s some of the devious tactics women parlayed against the master and his mistress: poisoning food and medicine with subtle folk remedies; fawning praise and obsequity to earn and undermine trust; caretaking children with moral instruction and compassion (in opposition to the depravity of their slaver parents); disrupting schedules and household tasks; pilfering, breaking tools, burning the oatmeal, fouling crops, slowing work details, exercising indolence, and exacting all sorts of domestic sabotage.

Some women rebelled outright. They started fires in homes and outbuildings as payback or as cover for revolts. They hid runaways and staffed escape routes. They coached children how to feign illness. And a few killed their babies, their beloveds, rather than have them endure a life of forced labor.

If the master tried to “take” her sexually, she viciously attacked him. Much written and oral testimony backs this up—the violence waged against carnal conquest, and the mental strain Black mothers faced when trapped between raising children (mulatto, maroon) and seeking favor or retribution with the “fathers.” This managing of her choiceless condition was often met by cruelty from a slaveholder’s wife who may have been raped herself.

A few historians before Davis (Herbert Aptheker was one) wrote of the skills at insurgency developed by U.S. slaves. Today, we recognize how resistance was practiced by women, their opportunities perhaps more available than the men’s—in the field, in the house, on the underground railroad, and in the domestic survival of an enslaved family.

But these things are hardly what the Florida educators mean by “personal benefits.” No, theirs is a policy fashioned by authoritarian conservatives—white nationalists gaslighting history—as racial propaganda. They are speaking to parents who think “fairmindedness” is in order when teaching American slavery to their children; they, the right wing, will play any (perverse) race card to rehabilitate the slavers and refuel the South’s Lost Cause.

Some contemporary white apologists seek to redefine slavery as an “issue” of a well-meaning rabble whose forebears designed the practice and weren’t that bad or even all bad. Human slavers must have some back-pocket redemption built into their patronage. Surely, there were kind masters here and there, a doting mistress of home and hearth, who taught an enslaved woman to read, to ride a horse, to decorate a supper table, to treasure keepsakes, to sew nightgowns, and to speak the King’s English. Surely.

Isn’t it true that such benevolence meant real human progress? Florida’s fair-minded argue that eventually freed Africans were given tenant farming as a means of moneyed indenture. Though the advance was very slow, the manumitted did receive schooling, literacy, gun rights, the vote for Black men, as well as segregated public accommodations, including toilets, transportation, hotels, swimming pools, parks, plus their own towns and business districts (leaving aside the Tulsa race massacre of 1923 that destroyed Black Wall Street). And the most astonishing consequence of working people to the bone: Africans in the Southern states, birthed a world-renowned artistic child—blues, jazz, gospel, R&B, soul—which we now regard as the core of American music. Surely, some of these developments were positive, even though Jim Crow laws stalled progress for more than a century with legal challenges and political violence.

Such logic of the Trumpian, Orwellian, revisionist variety, which enables suffering and dilutes its involvement, is fuzzy, full of holes, and a source, for me, of sardonic humor.

Of course, the pedophile priest was nice to his altar boy at first. Of course, a kind hangman granted a last sumptuous meal to the leader of a slave rebellion. Of course, Primo Levi’s captors in Auschwitz used his expertise as a PhD. chemist in an on-site lab producing synthetic rubber, though his luck was not shared by most of the 1.1 million, his fellow prisoners, who were murdered in that camp alone. And, of course, poets and proletarians chained to walls in gulags during Stalin’s Great Terror from 1936 to 1937 confessed to themselves, in unison, “Now, during my show trial, detention, and torture, isn’t there an opportunity here for me to learn some survival skills?”

2 / It’s purely specious, with or without sarcasm, to claim that the extremes of suffering produce noble outcomes. And yet the assertion has a pedigree. Rudyard Kipling wrote that the British absorption of the nonwhite races into the Empire was the “White Man’s Burden.” In the poem, he lectures England’s conscripted imperialists to “Send forth the best ye breed / To serve your captives’ need, / To wait in heavy harness / On fluttered folk and wild / Your new-caught sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child.” How incongruous a contrast of the Native’s character: a fiendish being lodged in an untutored child.

Dinesh D’Souza, the Indian American heir of Kipling’s call and rightwing agitator, once told me that he thanked God for India’s subjugation because he was taught Western Civilization by the mannered overlords, not to mention lessons in the glorious English language. If D’Souza’s belief was commonly held in India, then revolts against the British occupiers would have arisen by those who wished to keep English rule. Check the pacifist resistance of Gandhi: staying part Brit wasn’t part of his agenda.

And yet, while freeing a nation of its political abusers may have been one solution, it hardly explains the mind-manacles of Christian conversion particularly in the American South. There, bondage was designed, in part, as a religious mission to save the vulnerable souls of the inferiors, before and after Emancipation.

The history of enslavement in the United States is chockablock with people who cited the Bible’s assertions that the “peculiar institution” was moral and divinely ordered. Jefferson Davis said, “Slavery was established by decree of Almighty God. It is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation.” As if that’s all it took to legitimize owning humans! Most slaveholders justified the system via Leviticus, where, it’s claimed, Jews have the “right” to own people like property and to free them, at will, for good deeds, or to keep them and their progeny forever. The Apostle Paul, Augustine, and St. John Chrysostom each taught that when bondsmen and bondswomen obeyed their masters, they were obeying God. Whether their subjects believed in that God or not was irrelevant.

In the New Testament, 1 Timothy 6:1-2, we find the enslaved repositioned as servants, a class distinction: “Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor, that the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed. And they that have believing masters, let them not despise them, because they are brethren; but rather do them service, because they are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit. These things teach and exhort.” 1 Timothy 6 goes on to say that such intentions are fundamental to Christ’s teachings. Louis W. Cable in his essay, “Slavery and the Bible,” noted that in Matthew 10:24-25, “Jesus not only reminds slaves that they are never above their master, he, actually, recommends that they strive to be like him.”

I find the language in 1 Timothy 6 (King James version) to be especially revealing: For one, the phrase “his doctrine be not blasphemed” suggests that Christian doctrine had been blasphemed, countered by unbelievers. (We are speaking of a master/servant system, of “slaves” in Judah, nearly 2,000 years ago.) Note, too, that servants should accept the masters but only if the masters evince belief in a vengeful God and a redemptive Christ. Thus, in another hypocrisy, if the believing masters are saved, then they are brothers to the enslaved, who will “partake of the [masters’] benefit.”

There’s that nasty little word again, reshaped by Florida’s Department of Education for public-school consumption: The white man’s burden is to Christianize the indigenous—for their benefit. Force-feed them the master’s religion. Attach their conversion to the gift of brotherhood. And brotherhood does not dissolve bondage but gathers the benighted person into Christ’s mercy. Forget about their earthly tribulation. Body and soul are saved. The result is, faith-based White Supremacists still insist that Black history in the New World is less about African Americans’ legal freedom and more about their salvation from sin.

3 / This “fake news” about “freedom” is among the greatest paradoxes in human history. To make enslaved people accept a religion that promises liberation (“When Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, the walls come a-tumbling down”) based on a mythical guide Southern deplorables used to justify slavery. Barred from learning to read, Africans were given Bible lessons orally by White ministers—tales of faith-based liberty from “the talking book,” as it was called by those who couldn’t read and yet gleaned some succor from the telling. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), a truly fair-minded author lingers on the contradiction between Christian manipulation and compassion of which the latter he could abide.

What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked.

How should we think about Douglass as well as the enchained masses who find value in Christ’s message? Was the adoption of its tenets slow, practical, superstitious? Why take on any doctrine favored by the slavers? Did the stories of Christ’s goodwill fill a moral longing? Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, thought “Negroes” were temperamentally docile; they relished like infants the story of Jesus as a lamb who fought against the wolves. Douglass valued Christ as a harbinger of nonviolence; Stowe accepted that Black woe was assuaged by worshipping a person who had suffered as they had. Both positions have been central to Black liberation for centuries. To what degree this new system of thought, enlivened by fables and folklore, arose from psychological indoctrination or choiceless participation or genuine faith is hard to say.

Christianizing Africans took its sweet time. First, the West African traditions had to be wiped out, during or after the Middle Passage; Igbo, Yoruba, and Ashanti sects, which were quite diverse, withered for three reasons: they were forbidden to practice their former rituals; they were exhausted on their “given” day of rest, nursing wounds and hunger; and they were often coerced to convert or else endure further hardship. As we’ve seen, the enslaved needed spiritual guidance as much as their masters did. A level playing field? Hardly. (When a few white Christians woke up and conceded that the cruelty of bondage far outweighed its salvational hocus-pocus, the abolitionist movement was born.)

Over a couple generations, the assembly of worship service and political meeting grew, though the latter was universally feared by the masters. According to the writings of Henry Louis Gates and William Barber II, secretive religious assemblies might parrot revolts described in the Bible, for one, the Moses-led escape by the Israelites from Egyptian captivity: “Tell all the pharaohs to / Let my people go.” In the previous century, the less radical and quieter congregations became the Black church—a place where song would give cover for discussions about uprisings, metaphorically loud yet politically muted. The Black church and Emancipation intersected at just the right time.

Willam Barber II has labeled this congress of joy and sorrow, the “freedom church.” In an essay written for Four Hundred Souls, edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, he notes that the first Black Baptist churches in America emphasized less “the individual’s decision to recognize their need for God’s grace and accept Christ for themselves” and more “a freedom church that interrupted the lies of racism.” Early on, church members avoided branding white men for those lies (though their guilt was obvious) and switched to allegories of subterfuge and redirection to make their case. To iterate Davis’s point, Black women sharpened the resistance with domestic deceitfulness.

A freedom church engendered African musicians to reset the rhythms of European song to accompany work and worship, and with such art stressed the solidarity of the group over the salvation of the individual. Freedom church was like a conference of revolutionaries who also sang and danced. Fighting the “lies of racism” with worship, music, and call-and-response sermons was not a benefit of slavery and the Whites’ two-faced religion. Rather, it was an indigenous creation of Black culture, which, sui generis, bore a kind of internal genius (which Jews knew in Europe for centuries) for building lasting institutions—of churches and hymns and texts and choirs, grounded in ecstatic vocal expression from W.E.B. DuBois to Maya Angelou, from Nina Simone to John Legend—in rough likenesses to their overlords. To what end? To fit into the dominant American church-going culture, to sweeten it and to undermine it.

4 / To conclude: We cannot say slavery is essential to a redeemed, and redeemable, Western identity. Some sins are forgivable; human bondage, the crime of crimes, is not. The world that forced slavery into existence and the world that arose in opposition is succinctly characterized by Toni Morrison: “The desire for freedom is preceded by oppression; a yearning for God’s law is born of the detestation of human license and corruption; the glamor of riches is in thrall to poverty, hunger, and debt.”

Which is to say: It’s the psychological and physical damage endured by captured Africans, child laborers, the disabled, the uneducated, the short-lived, over generations, that fosters those by-any-means-necessary calls to rebellion. Slavery’s holocaust in the West cannot be scrubbed or blunted by the canard that suffering produces a good work ethic, solid training from which future employers will profit.

The American value, “the desire for freedom,” was willed by African hostages, then abetted by the collective human resourcefulness of a wide range of insurgents who fought with hand and mind what Angela Davis defines as “male supremacist structures.”

Is this what Florida officials are educationally avoiding because it explains the historical mission of male-imposed slavery, which, like a redoubt on the coast, must be guarded at all costs? Imagine a curriculum built on the benefits accrued by Black women, by a Black community, and a Black freedom church. In short, it would be the story of how enslaved persons took responsibility, built agency, and freed themselves—no thanks to Whites. Which reminds me of a core tenet in the Republican and Floridian mindset: You, stuck in poverty and despair, pull yourselves up by your own bootstraps!