by Walter Johnson, The Boston Review
In Memory of Cedric Robinson (1940–2016)
It is a commonplace to say that slavery “dehumanized”
enslaved people, but to do so is misleading, harmful, and worth resisting.
I hasten to add that there are, of course, plenty of
right-minded reasons for adopting the notion of “dehumanization.” It is hard to
square the idea of millions of people being bought and sold, of systematic
sexual violation, natal alienation, forced labor, and starvation with any sort
of “humane” behavior: these are the sorts of things that should never be done
to human beings. By terming these actions “inhuman” and suggesting that they
either relied upon or accomplished the “dehumanization” of enslaved people,
however, we are participating in a sort of ideological exchange that is no less
baleful for being so familiar. We are separating a normative and aspirational
notion of humanity from the sorts of exploitation and violence that history
suggests may well be definitive of human beings: we are separating ourselves
from our own histories of perpetration. To say so is not to suggest that there
is no difference between the past and the present; it is merely that we should
not overwrite the complex determinations of history with simple-minded notions
of moral progress.
