Our slaves, ourselves

In the wake of the cold-blooded violence in Charleston comes the urgent and sonorous cry against America’s abominable history of racism. This history is symbolized not only in the Confederate flag but is stained on the black victims of state violence whose names comprise the headlines of recent months. President Obama’s second term has been defined not necessarily by an increase in racial violence compared to times past but rather by a broader awareness of its prevalence and public anger towards it.

These punctuated moments of violence remind us that the repressed memory of slavery still hammers away at our national unconscious, only to resurface sporadically in Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charleston. There is, it seems, a profound and harmful disconnect between American nationalism and slavery, and the unsettling question of what should be the average American’s relationship to this history. Often, slavery is understood only as relevant to African American life or isolated as part of the ignominious southern past. It appears safely quarantined from the rest of us.

{mosads}But from an alternate view, most Americans bear an attachment to slavery, even if indirectly. The multitudes that have come to this country for generations have encountered a nation built on slavery, one that grew to greatness on profits derived from human property. The slave economy was such that all Americans have in some way benefitted from the 4 million slaves living in the United States at the conclusion of the Civil War. To conveniently excise the South from the nation’s history in order to condemn its slavocracy is to overlook the massive and omnipresent financial network of early American capitalism. Key institutions comprising all social, political, and cultural sectors, from government and education, to arts and entertainment, drew wealth and inspiration from slavery.

There would have been no American grandeur without chattel bondage. To think that all U.S. residents today are not all connected to slavery is a misconception. My own ancestors, under circumstances not entirely clear to me, came from Norway and Sicily. They, like so many others, arrived seeking the promise of prosperity, freedom, and reinvention. But could the America that they encountered, thrived in, and produced the conditions that eventually produced me have existed without slavery? This makes for an awkward acknowledgement that one’s existence, at some level, depends on slavery and cannot be conveniently removed from its violent legacies. This realization also risks giving slavery a kind of notoriety while forcing one to be beholden to one of the most horrific human creations of modernity that was sweeping in its geographic and humanistic scope, relentless in its depth of brutality and depravity. How to confront the prospect that our own origins are in some way rooted in the very evil institution that we despise?

This is not to say that we all have equal identification with this history. Blacks, latinos, Asians, whites, and Native Americans have different relationships with the “peculiar institution.” Certainly Michael Brown and Eric Garner lived and died in a legacy of slavery distinct from what whites experience. The rampage in Charleston reminds us of these uneven relationships. It has prompted President Obama to speak further on the topics of race and racism in America with a conviction lacking in his first term. Charleston is a place soaked in slave history, one of the principal ports of entry for enslaved Africans entering the United States. The call to take down the Confederate flag rests in the memory of the Civil War, the commemoration of which has been strikingly absent in Obama’s public presence. Its sesquicentennial has bridged his first and second terms, but the president has largely been silent on the topic, offering more commemorative speeches on the Civil and Voting Rights Act of 1964 and 1965 than on the war that broke the union. One might assume that a sitting president, especially one of mixed-race identity, would take up the theatrics of Civil War commemoration since it poses a ripe opportunity to promote national cohesion.

But because the racial politics etched in the contours of the War are still present and divisive, the topic becomes a difficult one to spin. While he gestured to it by retracing Lincoln’s inaugural train trip and by using the sixteenth president’s hallowed Bible in both of his own inaugurals, Obama largely has been circumspect about Civil War memory. It is a tall order for the nation’s first African American president to memorialize the War while egregious racial inequality still persists. What would such a speech look like in Charleston? It is urgent that such memory become part of the ongoing dialogue of race today, and that we all reappraise our proximity to slavery and its long-lived aftermath.

Gronbeck-Tedesco is assistant professor of American studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey.