Sambo Thesis of Slavery by Stanley Elkin

Sambo Thesis of Slavery by Stanley Elkin

Introduction

Stanley Elkins wrote “Slavery: A problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life” in 1959 which is considered to be controversial influential piece in the history of slavery. In his writing, Elkin has outlined the slavery issues prevalent in 1950s. The most controversial topic is the theory of Sambo he has given in his book. He defined Sambo as the typical North American slave personality. It is a state of mind, which according to Elkin, allowed masters to gain a complete control over their black slaves. Owing to this control, slaves' body and mind used to submit their will to their masters' and made them incapable of resisting. It was the state of mind which diminished the desire of liberation from them and also erased sense of a distinct culture. While putting up this theory, he compared the slavery institution in the United States to the concentration camps in Nazi era.

This theory along with the comparison sparked debate amongst historian, making Elkin' thesis to be a influential topic in study of slavery. It is after the publication of Elkin's thesis that historians started focusing on daily lives of slaves rather than only studying about slave-master relationship.

Discussion

Elkin gave the Sambo thesis in the chapter “Slavery and Personality' of his book “Slavery: A problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life” making it the most controversial chapter of his book or his writing career. It also considered being one of the most emblematic written pieces of the era on which the book was published i.e. Civil Rights era. In this chapter he discusses the validity of the conventional perception of the southern slaves as a Sambo figure (Elkins, 1959). According to him American slave culture was a society of helpless dependents who find it difficult to revolt and prefer living under their masters' instructions.

His arguments were based on the then recent psychological and sociological research conducted by Bruno Bettelheim along with other researchers on inmates of Nazi concentration camps set up during the Second World War. The research showed that the totalitarian surrounding gradually destroyed the abilities of inmates to plan, resist, and to maintain a positive relationship with each other (Elkins, 1959). This research made Elkin speculate that the antebellum slavery system was also producing same environment which was instilling an infantilized and dependent personality patterns. However, his thesis has one implication that is different from that of Bruno Bettelheim research, that such personality pattern might exists in his very own time, almost a century after the end of slavery (King, 2001).

In order to prove his thesis of Sambo a valid kind, which he believed to be existing in influential numbers on American plantations, he chose three theories of personality form the social sciences and psychological sphere. He drew his thesis on the psychology of Freud to illustrate the weakening process of self-esteem and self-identification along with the father-images developed by provokers, which in the case of American ...