Scenes of Subjection Quotes

“If freedom is simply the opposite of bondage, while affording nothing other than the right to compete with other free people in a human scrum for income, food, clothing, and housing, then it is an exceedingly thin and narrow conception of liberty. If, however, we think of freedom as a right to move through life with genuine self-possession that can only be rooted in the satisfaction of basic human needs and desires, then Black emancipation in the United States was something altogether different. Indeed, how could a conception of freedom that was so intimately conjoined with enslavement produce any other outcome, when the only thing separating slavery from freedom was the declaration that it was over? With no effort to address the past, to heal the deformation cast unto Blackness that had been used to rationalize and legitimize slavery, and with no effort to ease the transition from property to person with freedom dues, then, as Du Bois lamented, the freedpeople enjoyed an ever-brief moment in the sun only to return to a condition as near to slavery as slavery itself.”
― Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America