On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

The Founders held a variety of views about slavery, but even some of those who opposed its spread (such as Jefferson) owned slaves themselves. As a general matter, we can say that early American elites often did not see the body of an African as a Leib. They generally believed that people from Africa were not fully human, that their bodies were different from their own. This belief remains with us, and it makes it harder for us all to be healthy. The racism was clear to me in the emergency room because I was dying. White people in the United States know about race, but they suppress that knowledge in an everyday covenant of ostensible ignorance. I did not learn about racism from the incident in the hospital; when I was at death’s door, what I already knew surged forward to clarify the situation, because it was relevant to my own survival. Only at the extreme did I need ordinary knowledge. Black Americans cannot deny what they know, because they need it to get through the day. When white people deny what we know, we turn situations where we might all do better into situations where we all do worse. While the doctors ignored my friend, I was dying a truth I hadn’t lived. Slavery was conceived of as negative freedom: a right of the slaveowner to own property, with which the government was not to interfere. It is this tradition that leads some of us to think that government action must work against non-Black people if it is working for Black people. Negative freedom invites wh...