Now, as I harken back to my days in Ms. Schumann’s 8th grade history class, it is apparent to me that the default historical mode forreferring to slavery is in itself “dehumanizing.” Slavery was not a unit by itself in that course, but instead appeared for the first time in our Civil War unit as one cause of the war. After appearing and taking the spotlight briefly, slavery became a recurring motif in the unit all the way up until the Emancipation Proclamation, when it was over with and we could finally all wash our hands of that unfortunate and out-of-character piece of American History. Once or twice we reminded ourselves that slavery would have been very unpleasant by mentioning working and whips.
    This take on American slavery teaches implicitly that slavery was of little consequence until the Civil War, which has many problematic implications. It also disregards the enslaved people who were living in bondage for generations before the Civil War, almost as if to say that they themselves were of little consequence to American History before war broke out. None of their stories appeared in my history lessons, which is ironic, considering that enslaved people are the primary reason the United States became so wealthy in the first place.
    This view of American History allowed us to imagine the institution of slavery as a footnote, which polishes over the truth that the whole of mainstream American society accepted it and lived by it for almost a hundred years after the nation’s founding. In reality, all the institutions of the United States bent to legitimize slavery, because it was just that profitable. Churches in the early 19th century preached visions of slavery as beneficial to both master and slave alike while science brought forth “proof” of great biological differences between whites and blacks. Certainly this level of significance should warrant more than a section of the civil war unit, right?
On top of that whitewashing, the idea that the enslaved people were dehumanized and treated like objects was explained away by the fact that their masters believed that they weren’t human. However, this is a convenient fiction and a great boon to the epistemology of ignorance, the knowledge system that keeps slavery in our societal mind as an evil unimaginable today.
    Did slave owners really have to think of enslaved people as objects to treat them as brutally as they did? Is it possible the mighty dollar-sign could have made them feel better about abusing human beings? Calling the actions of the white slave owners of the Antebellum South “inhumane” denies that humans are capable of such moral transgressions, when in fact, as the article “To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice” suggests, it is these very actions that in part define what it means to be human. It is for the better that we accept this reality of the human condition for the sake of avoiding future genocides and societal ills caused by denial.
    In Schumann’s class, we understood that the institution of slavery was dehumanizing. Now I understand that American citizens made up that institution. More importantly, I understand that even as these citizens attempted to turn people into objects by treating them that way, enslaved people resisted every step of the way and the attempt was unsuccessful. The distinction here is that while slavery was dehumanizing to the enslaved black people, it never successfully dehumanized them. Enslaved people never lost their humanity, even when they lost most of their freedom.

Pledged JD Deming 10-7