U.N. and the new slavery

U.N. and the new slavery

Introduction

The article under review and analysis is “U.N. and the new slavery” published in LIFE Magazine dated 27 Jul 1953. If we analyze the article according to the US society, we can say that slavery is one of the most important topics in the American history.

John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau confronted slavery as an intellectual problem; Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun, and Frederick Douglass lived it. This is what led C. L. R. James to say that what Europeans faced as a philosophical question, the Americans faced as an empirical one. Slavery was the defining issue of American politics in the nineteenth century. Its legacies—segregation, civil rights, and racial discrimination—have profoundly shaped its twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Discussion and Analysis

American slavery was a struggle between masters' attempts to impose “social death” on the slave and slaves' efforts to seek freedom and build a community. Orlando Patterson (1982) argues that slavery is a system in which the master seeks to strip the slave of all kinship ties and social standing so that the slave is physically alive (and therefore able to labor for the master) but socially dead, belonging to no recognized community and possessing no legitimate genealogy.

Slaves resisted this social death in three ways. First, they sought freedom, by purchasing it, suing for it, running away, or rebelling. Second, they sought to make the terms of labor more favorable, through work slowdowns, attempts to shorten the working day, subterfuge, sabotage, maintaining their own livestock or garden plots, participating in markets, or hiring out their labor and keeping a portion of their wages. Third, they created their own families and their own culture. While masters sought to impose their rule from sunup to sundown, from sundown to sunup slaves created a community that denied the authority of the master and defied social death. Slaves shaped their own customs, religion, dialect, music, economy, and political perspectives, merging African, indigenous, and European practices into a uniquely and truly American culture. This conflict between “sunup to sundown” and “sundown to sunup,” or between social death and the resistance of the black community, is one of the fundamental experiences of the American political tradition.

It also produced the racial order. Europeans sat at the top and Africans the bottom of the social hierarchy throughout the Americas. Further, African slavery was the dominant form of labor exploitation in the hemisphere because it was economically cheaper than importing European indentured servants or enslaving the indigenous population, since African slaves were plentiful, cheap, and politically powerless, possessing no “rights of Englishmen” or membership in indigenous communities to appeal to for protection.

But slavery in the United States differed from the rest of the hemisphere in the form of social control involved. In the West Indies and Brazil, for example, slaves were controlled by an intermediate “buffer control stratum” of creoles that stood between them and the planters (Allen, 1994, 1997). (Members of this group were generally referred to as mulatto or ...