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Still debating slavery

SCOTT PIEPHO
Cases and Controversies

Published: April 18, 2014

This past month has seen a lot of talk about slavery of all things. When the film 12 Years a Slave won the Oscar for Best Picture, a number of conservative pundits including Rush Limbaugh launched various complaints about the alleged political correctness of the win. Many of the articles and tweets against 12 Years linked back to older negative reviews of the film in the conservative press.

Then Judge Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News contributor, gave voice to his long-standing criticisms of Abraham Lincoln and ended up on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to debate his view that the Civil War was unnecessary, which of course again raised the question of slavery.

Napolitano shouldn’t be conflated with the critics of 12 Years a Slave; he both starts and ends in a different place. But they all make similar mistakes and those mistakes cloud discussions of both the history of American slavery and what it means to confront racism in America today.

The conservative critics of 12 Years a Slave sounded out two themes: Get over slavery and it wasn’t that bad, really. For example, The American Spectator’s critic called the film “propaganda,” infamously arguing “[i]f ever in slavery’s 250-year history in North America there were a kind master or a contented slave, as in the nature of things there must have been, here and there, we may be sure that [director Steve] McQueen does not want us to hear about it.” John Derbyshire, a columnist recently dismissed by The National Review for racially-problematic columns, went so far as to call the film “civil rights porn.”

Judge Napolitano, a libertarian, unreservedly regards slavery and other forms of institutional racism as evil, but argues that they are government-created evils. As such, he believes that the country would have been better off if slavery had been allowed to die naturally which, he asserts, it was in the process of doing.

The threads between Judge Napolitano’s anti-Lincoln/anti-Civil War views and his libertarianism can be seen most clearly in his argument that the war begat the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow. He claims this is so because emancipation came about via “government violence” as opposed to being born “in the natural progress of human freedom.” The Civil War thus becomes another exhibit in the libertarian case that government can’t do anything right.

All of the above ignores two essential aspects of Southern slavery. First, as the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates argues, slavery was a system of violence against the enslaved. Frederick Douglass’s biographies acknowledge both kind masters and contented slaves. But he also makes clear that a kind master could only keep slaves because of the inherent threat of violence in the slave system.

Not every slave suffered to the same degree as 12 Years protagonist Solomon Northrup, but the fact that a kind master could sell a discontented slave to a Deep South plantation where work was exhausting and whipping common had everything to do with the contentment that Bowman wants to see portrayed.

And if the reverberations of government violence inevitably produce lasting effects as Judge Napolitano claims, the 250 years of state-sponsored violence against people of African descent probably did more to seed Jim Crow than the Civil War did.

While slavery required a system for meting out violence, it also required an intellectual foundation, the ideology of white supremacy.

The Southerners who donned white sheets and began a campaign of terror against freed slaves did not do so out of reaction to the war as war per se, but out of fear that they would lose their white prerogatives. When whites the majority-black state of Mississippi succeeded in dismantling the reconstruction government and disenfranchising black residents to re-install a minority white government, they did not do so because of the Civil War. It did so because the white minority believed in both their superiority and in their right to power.

Judge Napolitano acknowledges the reality of racist ideology, but will not acknowledge that this reality might explain more about 20th century racism than a generic caricature of government as evil does. (He only criticizes the codified racism as embracing positivism as opposed to natural law, which argument is well beyond the scope of this column or any other that someone would actually want to read.)

On the other hand, the anti-12 Years backlash seems in large part a denial of the enduring power of white supremacist thinking in our culture today. Movies like 12 Years a Slave are important because this idea retains power to perpetuate discrimination today. And we cannot rise above the legacy of slavery without understanding what it did to us.

Scott Piepho has been writing his award-winning column “Cases and Controversies” since 2009. He is a freelance writer; at various times in the past he has been a practicing attorney, county prosecutor, community organizer, stay-at-home dad and university instructor. He is currently studying creative nonfiction in the NEOMFA program at the University of Akron. He can be contacted at scott.piepho@gmail.com.


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