“Slavery’s essential role in building the most powerful nation on earth has been minimized, if not wholly ignored,” KeeangaYamahtta writes.
,” first appeared in print in 1997, during the last period of spoiled “race relations” in the twentieth century. Just a few years prior to its publication, the United States had experienced the Los Angeles rebellion, one of the largest urban insurrections in American history. In response to the uprising, the American state rallied its political forces around crime legislation and a prison-building bonanza.
This kind of national celebration of the symbolic, while leaving undisturbed the architecture of oppression that has made African Americans disproportionately vulnerable to premature death and a “travestied” freedom, has been a hallmark of the Black experience since the abolition of slavery.
Hartman is suggesting that, instead of thinking of America’s persisting crises of racial inequity, domination, and subjugation as the accumulated toll of missed opportunities, failed programs, and policy conundrums, perhaps we consider a deeper, existential problem with American democracy itself. American freedom, liberty, justice, and democracy came into being through slavery, genocide, rape, dispossession, murder, and terror.
Mid-twentieth-century racial liberalism held the assumption that the central problem in the United States was that of exclusion, as opposed to extraction, accumulation, and dispossession. In other words, the racial liberals assumed that the inclusion of Black Americans into the American mainstream would produce a large Black middle class.
Hartman argues for a different approach to distilling the brutality of slavery. By looking at what she describes as the “quotidian routines of slavery,” she suggests that we can see something even more insidious about the institution. In this way, she examines the demand of slaves as entertainment for white audiences as a potentially more fruitful place to understand slavery as a site of domination.
The domination and subordination at the core of American enslavement shaped the afterlife of Black Americans as freedpeople. The continuation of abuse and recurring efforts across the South to reimpose the conditions of slavery on the freed were enshrined into law with the Black Codes in slavery’s immediate aftermath.
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