How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

that most ‘dehumanized’ enslaved people. And yet these actions epitomize the failure of this set of terms to capture what was at stake in slaveholding violence: the extent to which slaveholders depended upon violated slaves to bear witness, to provide satisfaction, to provide a living, human register of slaveholders’ power.” Julia Woodrich’s words lingered. When that man made Julia’s sister lie down in his bed he did not have to believe her to be less than human. He simply had to know that she did not have the power to stop him. To be sure, enslaved women often resisted these advances in ways large and small, but they were up against not only the physical power of the person enacting violence against them but also the power of the state, the power of patriarchy, the power of a society. These acts were not only permissible but legally encouraged. There were laws stating that almost any crime committed by a white person against a Black person was in fact not a crime at all.iv The illogic of it all appears to reveal a simple linear truth that is often lost—oppression is never about humanity or lack thereof. It is, and always has been, about power.

Sylvia winter human as praxis