Another "S" word

 

As a White person, my ability to speak about racism and related subjects comes up against some hard limits.* During my elementary school years (in a community that was 99% White, I might add), the Civil Rights movement was at its peak, and fortunately, many teachers and community members cared to be on the right side of history. Still, what it boiled down to was "Racism=bad! Slavery=bad! Now that we all agree on that, we can move on to other subjects."  Having read Robin DiAngelo's book White Fragility, I've come to understand how pathetically weak so much of that teaching was, however well-intentioned, and how it gave rise to so much ignorance and naive thinking that easily backfired, doing more harm than good. I'm relieved that so many activists have found their voices -- people who understand what racial justice means from the inside, rather than spectators watching from the sidelines, thinking they understand so much more than they actually do.

The Washington Post has recently published a series about members of the United States Congress who were owners of enslaved people. There's much to say about this entire topic, but for now I'd like to focus on just one aspect.

The article mostly lacks two words: "slavery" and "slaves." It does mention "slaveholding," but much more frequently, it offers phrases that feature important words: people and human beings.

What makes this so important is that the word "slave" denotes an occupation. "My great-great-great grandparents were slaves," as someone else might say "They were farmers, they were doctors, they were shopkeepers," etc. However lowly or disagreeable an occupation, the person who performs it does so voluntarily. Most workers at all levels have the right to take a day off, to earn money that they spend at their discretion, and to decide, perhaps, that they want to spend their lives doing something else.

Enslaved people had no such options. They worked seven days a week, from sunup to sundown, often in shackles. If a worker put down his or her basket and said "I'm going back to my cabin to relax for a while," s/he could expect to face severe consequences up to and including death. 

And for the original African natives who were kidnapped, crammed into ships and transported to North and South America for the express purposes of laboring, and breeding more of their kind for laboring, time has erased whatever occupations they may have had. But it's not too odd to guess that they had occupations just like people we know today: Inventors, teachers, artisans, healers, landowners, and so much more. It was only after their lives were turned upside down that they became known as "slaves." 

We now call them "enslaved people," which is a sign of great progress in changing the language to keep the conversation fresh and meaningful.  I hope a great many more people will read the Washington Post article and rethink the entire concept of enslavement and remember that beyond everything else, these (and their descendants) are, and were, people.

*which is why anything I might offer here may not be worth much.