Teaching the history, and in my case this year, the literature of slavery provides a unique opportunity to make clear the moral and ethical purpose of doing the humanities.
Students are generally well versed in the horrors of slavery, but it’s important to make sure they’re thinking about the emotional and sexual labor enslaved people were forced to perform.
The humanities make us human. Learning the humanities is an exercise in morality. Slavery offers one of the most visceral ways to demonstrate this. I absolutely do not mean to suggest that the history of slavery is valuable simply as a teaching tool or is a sufficient exploration of Black History. As Teaching Tolerance notes this is tricky terrain and avoiding essentialism and curriculum violence is important.
Still, teaching slavery necessarily raises questions of morality that are inescapable. The easy way out is to let students have the natural reaction that slave owners were monsters, inhuman, insane, morally bankrupt. This is where most lessons stop. This is easy. It feels good. We know right from wrong, we know the good people from the bad, we study history to remember that there were bad people and to remember to be good people. This allows us to feel good about ourselves in the present while judging others in the past. It reeks of a Manichean, simplistic, and avoidant ethics.
The reaction to this facile morality is perhaps worse. This is the argument that the study of history is an objective, even scientific endeavor, and that our own feelings and biases should be suppressed as much as possible. This position would have us try to understand slave owners as simply members of a particular society in a particular moment, and thus exempt from our judgment. This is clearly morally untenable, and completely misunderstands the purpose of history.
My solution is to explore the moral possibilities of empathy. I encourage students to empathize with everyone in a particular historical moment, not to excuse or pardon, but in order to spark moral introspection. With the recognition that slave holders were not inhuman monsters, but humans who did terrible things and participated in a brutal society comes the recognition that we too are human and vulnerable to such horrific failings. I emphasize that the fact that slavery seemed to some to be “normal” does not exempt a slave society from our judgment, but it does demand an inventory of the “normals” in our society.
Eventually, students will start to think about economic inequality, homelessness, and perhaps the refugee and immigration crises. The ultimate goal is to get them to think even more globally. Once they start to bring up the carceral state, neolibaral globalization, human trafficking and other systemic injustices, they can start to understand the broadest point; not only do we continue to refuse to confront the legacies of America’s race-based, chattel, hereditary slavery, but we continue to live in a world in which the freedom of some depends on the enslavement of others.