Playing the Game

Slaves were isolated from their bodies, yet they manipulated the slave market. Being presented as commodities in the South, they grew accustomed to being looked at and touched. However, looking out for each other, assessing the buyers who prodded, and choosing how the slaves presented themselves, they had some power to guide a buyer’s decision-making process.

Information was traded off from buyer to slave and vice versa, and the slaves noted these details to tell each other whenever the hour was free to do so. Slaves and buyers had one thing in common: they relied on the perception of the other. Slaves would pay attention to the conversations buyers had with the traders, the clothing they wore, and their demeanor. Slaves were slaves and did not necessarily stand out from one another like buyers did. The buyers, on the other hand, were all distinct. The clothing the buyers wore indicated their wealth. The conversations and negotiations buyers had with the traders gave the slaves information to work with. Listening for keywords like “city” versus “plantation” meant either a decent life or a more difficult one, boiling in the heat. The more questions that the slaves were asked, the easier it was for them to finagle their answers.

            Slaves had the opportunity to manipulate the buyers, because buyers would ask questions and perform examinations. Histories of sickness and scars were asked of the slaves. Buyers were never utterly sure if the traders or the slaves were telling the truth. Part of the job of the buyer entailed being able to figure out the correct answers to the stories they were told by the traders. If lies were found out, punishment was in the near future for the slave who told the truth to the buyer, if the truth were not wanted, punishment was still a possibility for that slave. Questioning the slaves gave buyers insight to the truth, but little did they know that the slaves were using these questions to their advantage.

            The way the slave market worked allowed the slaves to know how the traders wanted them to act and what the buyers were searching for. How the slaves decided to represent themselves could turn into a risky situation. Slaves shaped their sale. Whatever the buyers asked of the slaves gave them a chance to construct themselves. Slaves had told each other stories of who had or had not been bought for whatever reason/story, and they learned to choose their buyers based on this information. Because the truth was only sometimes told, buyers and traders had difficulty trusting slaves. Slaves were just playing the game of survival through resistance and manipulation.

           

WC: 442

Pledged: Kendall Gasner

Johnson, Walter. "Acts of Sale." In Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, 162-88. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

The Polling of Protest

On August 28, 1963, a quarter of a million activists descended on the nation’s capital to shed light on and protest the rampant racial injustice that was endemic in the United States. The climax of the day came as Dr. Martin Luther King gave his impassioned “I Have a Dream” speech to a roaring crowd. While this represents a seminal moment in the struggle for equality and a high water mark for social activism in the United States, contemporaneous polling betrays the negative attitudes surrounding protest in the tense atmosphere of fraught race relations. Specifically, when asked about the March on Washington, and other organized protests such as sit-ins and the Freedom Rides, a majority of Americans disapproved of the activism. When asked about Dr. King himself in 1966, “63% of Americans gave [him] a negative score on a scale from -5 to 5”. In a modern context, these polling data may come across as surprising given the fact that these moments of unbridled social activism and the individuals who led and participated in them are held in a certain historical reverence today, and rightfully so. But when observed in conjunction with the overarching racial attitudes of the day, (those that made the activism vitally necessary in the first place) the unpopularity of the March on Washington, the Freedom Rides, and King himself can be properly contextualized.

The idea of protest cannot be separated from its fundamental nature; that it exists to affect change in a society that may not want or be ready for it. Vietnam War protests, marches for LGBT rights, and protests against going to war in Iraq in 2003, while they would likely be popular today, had majority disapproval ratings during their time. All of this is to say that, to base our assessment of the merits of any type of organized social action on its approval rating would be to mischaracterize the situation completely. Protest acts as an agent of change. As an agent of change, it cannot flip public opinion overnight, nor should it aspire to. Rather, protest shifts the conversation, it opens a dialogue and forces those who may not normally have an opinion, to confront an issue and think on it.

Modern protests, whether staged by Black Lives Matter, Occupy, or professional athletes, closely mirror the disapproval ratings of moments of activism during the Civil Rights Movement. That said, these movements have undeniably succeeded in shifting the national dialogue, to the point where both of the major party presidential candidates were forced to face questions on police brutality, income inequality, and the mistreatment of minorities. It is impossible to predict whether or not modern protests will benefit from the same bump in popularity that Civil Rights protests received over time, but in some ways, it’s unimportant. To truly understand the success of an act of protest, look to the surrounding conversation, not to the polls.

WC: 517

Pledged: Nick DeMaris

Polling data from:

Harry Enten, “The NFL Protests May Be Unpopular Now, But That Doesn’t Mean They’ll End That Way,” FiveThirtyEight, September 25, 2017, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-nfl-protests-may-be-unpopular-now-but-that-doesnt-mean-theyll-end-that-way/.

Sunday football and Free Speech

Sunday Football and Free Speech

I never grew up watching Sunday Football- my professional sports teams include the Cubs, Bulls, and Blackhawks. However today I have been paying more attention to Sunday football than ever before. This weekend we have seen the power of free speech and when that free speech is supported. This weekend we have seen that our president supports free speech for white supremacists but thinks Black athletes should be fired for their free speech.

At a rally in Alabama on Friday Trump criticized NFL players who protest the national anthem, saying he wished NFL owners would "fire" the players and say "Get that son of a b---- off the field right now."  Trump calling upon the owners of NFL teams to fire their players who took a knee during the anthem brings to mind slave dynamics. However the owners mostly stood up for their players, legitimizing their movement. On Saturday NFL teams released statements condemning Trumps statements. Then Sunday football was kicked off with the Baltimore Ravens’ and Jacksonville Jaguars’ players and coaches kneeling and locking arms in London during the singing of the national anthem. This was followed by many teams also kneeling in solidarity, linking arms, or staying in the locker rooms during the national anthem.

These mass demonstrations are related to class because it shows that our constitution and freedom of speech really only applies to a particular type of person. Last year when Kaepernick took a knee in protest of police violence against minorities he was ostracized from the NFL community. People criticized his form of protest as inappropriate. Yet they also criticized protesters against people violence of being violent. There seems to be no good way to express the first amendment, especially as a black male. This seems like a contradiction but through the lens of African American History we know that these contradictions are built into the foundation of our country. We know that the constitution was created by white men to protect white men. The First Amendment to Freedom of Speech does not apply to particular people because it was not made for those people. We have seen that clearly this weekend with the president's remarks.

Which brings us back to the current moment. Who is being listened to and who is participating in this current movement? Players, coaches, and owners have come together to support each other in response to Trump's remarks. In my opinion the most interesting kneel was taken by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, a Trump supporter who donated $1 million to the inauguration. Why now buddy?

I would love to hear what you all think.

Word Count 437

Rachel Farley

Identity, Agency and Humanity=NOT THE SAME THING

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was undoubtedly a horrifying, violent and dehumanizing system of oppression that is the backbone of our country. Even with consensus around that fact, there is still room for misconceptions that continue to lead to racial stereotypes and subjugation. Even seemingly “progressive” ways of thinking about slavery can perpetuate harmful ideas about people of color that sustain racism. I’ve been thinking a lot about common misconceptions regarding the trade, particularly those surrounding identity. Three main issues I’ve located and want to analyze are the romanticization/victimization of the entirety of Africa, harmful generalizations about how slaves’ identities were formed and the difference between agency and humanity.

One common misconception is that everyone who lived in Africa (people tend to forget that it’s a HUGE continent) lived and existed in perfect harmony prior to the slave trade. This idea is idealistic, and ultimately dehumanizing—it assumes that Africans all held the same beliefs, and were not complex people with complex ideas. Although Africans were the victims of New World slavery, and it is important to recognize that, it does more harm than good to forget about/assume the political, social and economic realities that existed in Africa during the slave trade. Additionally, it’s important to note that skin color did not tie people together necessarily prior to the trade. While the intent behind these generalizations are typically good, they ultimately stereotype and isolate Africans more. If the narrative depicts Africans as one-dimensional, harmful ideas about race continue to be perpetrated.

Similarly, one interesting and important idea raised in the reading is that shared language and traits does not necessarily equal community. The view, although typically intended to humanize slaves by demonstrating how they connected and built community, works to do just the opposite—it dehumanizes Africans by failing to recognize that they had opinions, preferences and personalities. As Smallwood writes, slavery, “brought together in anomalous intimacy. A product of violence, the slave cargo constituted the antithesis of community” (Smallwood, 101). She goes on to say, “If Africans from a particular region can be said to have common culture (usually defined so broadly that it is based solely on historically related languages), they are presumed to represent a coherent community of actors entering the Atlantic world together, as if people who could talk to each other can be assumed to have wanted to talk to each other” (Smallwood, 119). She then notes that, “This premise rests, however, on the erroneous assumption that shared cultural traits automatically constitute community” (Smallwood, 119). When thinking about slavery and race, it is crucial to remember that there is/was a wide array of cultural identities in Africa. Additionally, this goes back to the other common misconception about identity that Africans arrived in the New World as ‘clean slates.’ Africans had specialized talents and abilities that they brought with them through the Middle Passage. The piece of Smallwood’s writing that resonated with me the most is her definition of identity. She writes that identity, “involved complex choices rather than a narrowly defined and prescribed script, and only the privileged were in a position to benefit from choosing to focus on the historical linkages of real genealogy as opposed to the situational linkages of fictive kinship” (Smallwood, 114). She goes on to say that, identity, “must be understood as a history of competitive claims to resources and power waged by groups whose identities were rooted not in shared language or ‘culture’ per se, but in the interplay of local, historically contingent markers of affiliation” (Smallwood, 115). It is important to think of identity as complex, formed by many complex factors and experiences.

Finally, the ideas in the reading surrounding identity raised some questions: What is the difference between agency and humanity? By only characterizing and understanding slaves by their agency, or resistance to slavery, are we defining Africans by their enslavement? Scholarly slavery discourse often involves resistance—how slaves rebelled, and refused oppression. It is important to consider the ways slaved displayed their humanity—individuals’ bonds with others, and things that mattered in their lives-- rather than just ways they resisted the trade. In only focusing on rebellion/maintaining agency, we (perhaps unintentionally) define people by the slave trade.   

What are some misconceptions y’all were taught about slavery? What are ways to combat these?

Word Count: 715

Pledged: Annie Jaffee

The Free Library. S.v. Stephanie E. Smallwood. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora