Slavery and Social Death Quotes

“Religion explains how it is possible to relate to the dead who still live. It says little about how ordinary people should relate to the living who are dead.”
― Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, With a New Preface

“institution but the embarrassing institution.”
― Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, With a New Preface

“: blacks are now incorporated and play major roles in its mainstream culture, national political life, and military, the election of Barack Obama to the presidency being only the culmination of this top-down process of disalienation. However, at the local, personal, and institutional levels, I believe that the lineaments of the culture of slavery still haunt African-American life in important ways, especially among the disconnected young people and working poor in its ghettos, prisons, and rural poverty belts, its influence perpetuated through both white racism, institutional and personal, and the slavery-generated, self-destructive tragedy of fragile institutions and fraught gender relations, themselves reinforced by postindustrial economic evisceration.70”
― Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, With a New Preface

“Finally, there is the group of mainly humanist intellectuals who constitute a movement known as Afropessimism.63 Reacting against the Pollyannaish postracial rhetoric at the turn of the century, they insist not just on the persistence of racism in America, but on the fact that race remains the critical divide in the nation, the living lineaments of slavery whose “afterlife” continues to define black Americans as socially dead, permanently excluded from the taken-for-granted civic culture and social life of white-defined America.”
― Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, With a New Preface

“enslaved person is given a new name and a new identity as a whore.”19 A nine-country study by a team of clinical psychologists headed by Melissa Farley found that 68 percent of sex slaves suffered symptoms of post–traumatic stress disorder. The study concluded that, “existing in a state of social death, the prostitute is an outsider who is seen as having no honor or public worth. Those in prostitution, like slaves and concentration camp prisoners, may lose their identities as individuals, becoming primarily what masters, Nazis or customers want them to be.”20”
― Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, With a New Preface

“civilisation. But I realise that loss of faith in people is more devastating than loss of faith in God.”
― Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, With a New Preface

“In light of such fatal uncertainties all relations were precarious, provisional, and tenuous; all community verged on the chaos that could rain down at any time from the deus ex machina of the slaveholder’s economic calculations or personal whim. The tragedy of trust under social death has been the most underestimated impact of slavery and the one that perhaps has had the longest afterlife beyond the legal abolition of the institution.”
― Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, With a New Preface

“once a year, as the cliometricians, those sharp-eyed accountants of social death, love to calculate. The fact of its possibility was experienced as an ever-present sense of impending doom that shadowed everything, every thought, every moment of her existence. This is the essence of natal alienation, which, in addition to its crushing psychological impact for every individual slave, also entailed their inability as a group to “freely integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives, to inform their understanding of social reality with the inherited meanings of their natural forebears, or to anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory.”
― Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, With a New Preface