This post was written by my husband, Brendan Quinn, after the June 30th event “An Evening with Ijeoma Oluo.”
Saturday night, I attended “An Evening with Ijeoma Oluo.” It was a remarkable event filled with the words, music, and poetry of Gretchen Yanover, Reagan Jackson and Ijeoma Oluo. The topic of the evening: a primer on how to discuss race and how to recognize, acknowledge and dismantle social systems that use race to isolate and oppress people of color.
In the afterglow of the event, my friend Ramiro was walking through the crowd speaking with attendees while recording or live-streaming, and he asked me what the most impactful moment was. I answered as best I could at the time, that the topic of White Privilege or White Fragility had been the most impactful. This wasn’t the case; perhaps for my former self it would have been a revelation, but not that night. To understand what had been the most impactful part of the evening required time apart to process.
I figured it out early the next day. There was a part of Ms. Oluo’s discourse where she said something to the effect of, “Slaves weren’t taken from their homes and sold into servitude because white Europeans were mad at them.” I’ve been pondering it for days now; a truth sitting right there in front of me, so simple and profound and previously ignored.
(From here on out, when I’m talking about white Americans I’m talking about the ones who see slavery as a bad thing. Yes, there’s a distinction to be made, and I really couldn’t care less about white folks who disagree with that. Their opinion is of no value to me; it is entirely meritless to any conversation worth having.)
Retrospectively, white Americans look back at slavery as an evil, abhorrent thing—and it was, of course—but what’s rarely acknowledged is that our modern view of slavery, in and of itself, is an evolved thought. Africans weren’t slaves because they were hated; they were slaves because they were objects to be used by their owners. Purchasing a slave was of no greater ethical concern for a colonial American than buying a shovel at Home Depot is for me now.
The life of an African in the colonies was seen as a commodity; incomparable to the indelible quality and permanence of a white European. In 1640, John Punch, an African indentured servant, had his servitude converted into permanent enslavement for running away while the two white indentured servants he ran away with simply had the length of their indenture extended. What later became the United States had just created its first slave. (1)
Yes, there were African land owners in colonial America, and yes there were African slave owners in colonial America, but in a system where only an African could become permanently and generationally enslaved and had no ability to vote or hold political office (with very few exceptions), power clearly and entirely rested in the hands of white landowners.
This disparity was exemplified and exacerbated in 1787 when America’s white founders determined how state populations would create proportional representation in Congress. Members of the convention who represented states without slave populations argued that a slave was not a person and as such their population should not be considered in matters of representation. Representatives from slave-holding states argued that slaves should be considered people with respect to representation, but as they had no ability to vote, slaves were nothing more than a means of leveraging more political power for white slave owners. Essentially, a white slave owner’s vote had the full weight of however many slaves they owned as if they were voting themselves.
The important takeaway isn’t the Three-Fifths compromise that came out of this debate; it’s that all leaders contributing to the debate considered slaves objects, chattel, inhuman, and undeserving of the basest level of empathy. It’s that these leaders of young America weren’t mad at black slaves; they just didn’t care beyond how slaves could be used to advance their own agenda.
Move forward to Dred Scott in 1857 where the Supreme Court decided in a 7-2 decision that no black American, free or slave, had the ability to sue another party in a court of law. Free black men and women were not citizens.
To support his position, Chief Justice Taney wrote the following:
[Black Africans imported as slaves] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputing, or supposed to be open to dispute; and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion.
White Americans were not mad at black slaves. To white Americans, black slaves were simply inferior as a matter of fact.
Move forward to 1866 and the 13th Amendment which states:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
In modern America, black Americans are imprisoned 5 times more often than white Americans (in 5 states, 10 times as often (2)); where black males receive 20% longer penalties than white males for similar crimes committed (3); where 64.5% of all prisoners serving life without parole sentences for non-violent crimes are black (3); where federally, 71.3% of prisoners serving life without parole sentences are black. The phrase “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” introduces a constitutionally protected route for a system designed to oppress black Americans to create a modern generation of slaves.
Move back a little bit: the Three-Fifths compromise. Here’s a map of the US showing prisoner population by state (4):
And here’s one that represents US overall population by state (5):
Prison populations are disproportionately higher in south and south-eastern states. Here’s a map of slave population by state in 1860 (6):
The system as it is now has converted slaves into prisoners. In 48 states, prisoners are not allowed to vote while incarcerated (Maine and Vermont permit inmate voting). In 21 states, released prisoners are not permitted to vote while on parole, and in some cases are required to pay fines, fees, or restitution before having their rights reinstated. In 13 states, prisoners never have their voting rights reinstated without a governor’s pardon or some arbitrary additional length of time after probation/parole. (7)
The Census bureau counts prisoners as residing in their place of incarceration. This census determines the number of state and local representatives and disproportionately increases power toward regions that hold prisons. Sound familiar?
Currently, 2.3 million black Americans are incarcerated (of a total 6.8 million people incarcerated). (8)
White America consistently and continually benefits from a system where black Americans are “regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they [have] no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
And we aren’t mad at black Americans. We watch as generation after generation of black Americans live without the necessities that we’ve guaranteed ourselves because we simply don’t care.
Wake the fuck up and start caring.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Punch_(slave)
4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate
6) https://people.uwec.edu/ivogeler/w188/south/slavery.htm
7) http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-voting-rights.aspx
8) https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/