While it is certainly important to talk about
how enslavement shaped Africans’ identities and black institutions, it is also equally
as important to consider how slavery shaped slaveholders and white America. In
large part, white identity was born out of the Slave Trade, especially conceptions
of white masculinity and femininity. Analysis and understanding of social
dynamics across races during the Transatlantic Slave Trade provides insight
into the development of toxic masculinity and tensions between the white
women’s suffrage movement and the abolitionist movement that continue to play
out between white women, white men, men of color and women of color today. Economic,
cultural, social and political capital were each dependent upon a white man’s relationship
to slavery—how many slaves he owned, what his type of slavery looked like and how
he moved through the world alongside his slave(s). Slaveholders identified so
deeply with slavery that it defined their credibility and masculinity, demonstrating
that racism and sexism are interconnected, and explaining past, as well as existing
tensions between race and gender movements.
For white men during the Transatlantic Slave Trade, owning
slaves indicated significantly more than just having economic stability and
power. Owning human beings spoke deeply about who these men were, what they
were good for, their abilities and their self-worth. White masculinity was
created through white men’s oppression of other people. Determining how ‘manly’ a person was depended on how
much cultural, social, political and economic capital he had—and, in turn, that
economic capital (which impacted all other forms of capital and vice versa) was
contingent upon the number of slaves he had. Masculinity, then, rested on
the ownership of other human beings. As Walter Johnson says in Soul by Soul, while slaveholders, "moved
upward through the social hierarchy, they gained access to ever more rarified
fantasies of what it meant to be a white man and slaveholder in the antebellum
South,” and that they, “could not hide their reliance upon the people they
bought” (Johnson, 88).
That a white man’s manhood depended upon how
many slaves he held and his relationship with slavery underscores the close
relationship between sexism and racism, though not all white women and people
of color suffered oppression equally. In fact, many white women used slavery to
their advantage—to combat the patriarchy, and ultimately gain the same
cultural, social, political and economic capital as their white male
counterparts. Johnson writes, “Some white women went a step further than Miriam
Hilliard or Kitty Hamilton: they used slavery
to dismantle the patriarchy” (Johnson, 97). If slaveholding meant upward
mobility, white women took the opportunity as it came. Johnson goes on to
explain that, “the process by which they participated in slave buying was
itself a renegotiation of the terms of domestic patriarchy” (100). While that logic is most certainly
twisted, it makes sense. Because the basis of all capital was a form of
oppression, one oppressed group became oppressors themselves in order to deconstruct
their own oppression. Women wanted power—and power meant being a white man, and
being a white man meant buying, selling and owning African people. This relationship
helps explain the historical tension between women’s rights movements led by
white women and anti-slavery movements. White women attempted to gain upward
mobility at the expense of black people, rather than beating down white
masculinity and power.
If you have examples of how tensions between
groups (born out of this history) play out today, comment below!
WC: 574
Pledged: Annie Jaffee
Completely agree! One thing that stuck me in that same section was how they used the purchase of excess slaves to prove themselves as men and the head of their own house. The idea of masculinity was limited to how many domestic slaves could you afford to give your wife, so she wouldn't have to work. By constantly "gifting" there kids with new slaves, male slaveholders are supporting this idea of men proving for their "dependents". How this idea of gift of luxury and comfort for women will only be offered through men was kind of shocking but not surprising. In this section you see the evolution of common beliefs towards women. An example that comes to mind is how many people believe that women shouldn't work but instead let their husband provide for them.
ReplyDeleteSuper interesting final analysis! This is a great connection to the segregated history of the feminist movement that I always struggle to reconcile with. I also find the relationship between slave trader and slave owner interesting, as it relates to this topic of inflated masculinity. One of the many nuanced interactions that worked to uphold the institution, slave owners would enforce the idea that slave traders were forcing human commodities onto their personal estates. In other words, the slave traders were the bad guys and the slave owners were innocent. This misconception benefited both actors as slave traders capitalized on this business strategy to become more aggressive with their sales, while slave owners were able to remain the hero. Slave owners, then, were regarded as benevolent paternal figures to their slaves. This worked to reinforce the false ideal that slaves were content to be enslaved, especially since their masters were like father-figures. I have always found this symbiotic relationship between slave owner and slave trader interesting as it was based on this idea of gaining (and keeping) capital as it is equivalent to gaining masculinity.
ReplyDeleteHi Annie! Thank you for writing on this. I agree that it is of paramount importance to consider and discuss how slavery shaped white America, not to afford sympathy, but to embrace the considerable effects of whiteness’ presence in this time. The paradigm of whiteness deeply affected black folk, but white folk too. The perpetuation of this need to assert dominance meant that to act outside of the norm was to deny self-worth, to deny one’s own assimilation into the culture of the majority. So indeed for white women, it was seemingly the most effective, if not the only path forward for greater equality to be submissive to the culture of white supremacy. Recognizing the tensions between race and gender movements leads to better understanding of why white women had a tendency to act in this way. The social and political capital white women had at this time was far greater than that of women of color, but not so considerable that they could subvert the dominant narrative enforced by white men. This power struggle is apparent in most movements for broader human rights and equality, with white folk belonging to marginalized groups obtaining greater affirmation, often at the expense of people of color belonging to those same groups. This disparity of accessibility is particularly frequent within the LGBTQ movement.
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