Subscribe to Receive the Daily Report

Tuesday, November 11th, 2014

“It’s symbolic annihilation of history, and it’s done for a purpose. It really enforces white supremacy”: Edward Baptist on the lies we tell about slavery

Author:     Michael Schulson
Source:    
Publication Date:    
Link: “It’s symbolic annihilation of history, and it’s done for a purpose. It really enforces white supremacy”: Edward Baptist on the lies we tell about slavery
Stephan:   I grew up in rural Tidewater Virginia and traveled widely in what we knew then as the "old South" when I was a boy and a young man. I got to know a then very elderly Black man who had been born a slave, and, at the same time, played whist with an elderly White woman of the gentry who had had a slave sleep on a cot at the foot of her bed when she was a girl. It was a very moving experience to listen to both of them tell the same stories from antipodal perspectives and I never forgot it. It left me with the conviction that the White narrative was a comforting lie. Now Edward Baptist has taken this mythology head on. Here is a taste.
Edward E. Baptist and his book Credit: DeDe Hatch

Edward E. Baptist and his book
Credit: DeDe Hatch

It’s impolite to talk about money. Perhaps that’s why, when we discuss the history of slavery in this country, we tend to talk about racism, and paternalism, and the way that awful social institutions just stick around, those pesky buggers — talk about anything, that is, except for the profits.

But there were profits, of course, and large ones. Slavery, after all, is a cost-efficient way to extract labor from human beings. It’s an exceptionally brutal flavor of capitalism. And it worked: In 1860, the U.S.’s four wealthiest states were all in the deep South. After the Civil War, though, white Americans found ways to downplay the profit motive. “Above all, the historians of a reunified nation insisted that slavery was a premodern institution that was not committed to profit seeking,” writes Edward Baptist in his new history of slavery, “The Half Has Never Been Told.” (Read the Salon excerpt from the book here.)

Baptist, a professor of history at […]

Read the Full Article