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

by Clint Smith

Black women were seen as both undesirable and sexually objectified. This is the illogic of white supremacy; it does not need intellectual continuity. The temptation is to say that this illogic “dehumanizes” its subject, though some historians argue that such a characterization is incorrect. Historian Walter Johnson aptly notes that the “language of ‘dehumanization’ is misleading because slavery depended upon the human capacities of enslaved people. It depended upon their reproduction. It depended upon their labor. And it depended upon their sentience. Enslaved people could be taught: their intelligence made them valuable. They could be manipulated: their desires could make them pliable. They could be terrorized: their fears could make them controllable. And they could be tortured: beaten, starved, raped, humiliated, degraded. It is these last that are conventionally understood to be the most ‘inhuman’ of slaveholders’ actions and those 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.”