Looking in the mirror held up by North Carolina slave narratives: White folks confronting the psychosocial legacy of slavery

Abstract

AbstractU.S. citizens are debating whether slavery and white supremacy are core constituents of the United States, whether white (This is a chapter in my forthcoming book White Work: Radical Genealogy as a Path to Racial Reparations. In an earlier chapter, I trace the ways in which the early colonists to Virginia began to think of themselves as “white.” Initially, they primarily self‐identified with being English and Christian. They used being Christian as a way to differentiate themselves from and elevate themselves above the Africans whom they were enslaving since 1619. Soon, however, more enslaved African people began to arrive from the Caribbean where they had been exposed to Christianity and adopted it. A new way to assume their superiority was needed by the colonists. Gradually, they began to claim whiteness as a central part of their identity and as a sign of their self‐appointed superiority. Like “race,” “whiteness” was a created construct used to justify slavery and the abuses of the enslaved by colonists.) children should be troubled by learning the brutalities of slavery and life under Jim Crow laws, and whether racial reparations are due to African Americans for the centuries of economic, political, and social oppression they have endured. While many white folks prefer to ignore or demean calls for reparations, others have turned to reparative genealogy. They are inquiring deeply into their ancestors' relationships to chattel slavery and white supremacy, committed to reckoning with their own and their ancestors' racial debts. They seek to develop what sociologist W. E. Du Bois called “double consciousness.” In order to protect themselves, African Americans had to try and see through the eyes of white people, as well as their own. But white folks too rarely attempt to see themselves through the eyes of Black people. During slavery, how were whites seen by Blacks? Philosopher George Yancy urges white people to engage in the work of developing double consciousness so they can see, as most people of color do, the pernicious white and class advantages that haunt us. My ancestors were enslavers in North Carolina. I turned to slave narratives from Black North Carolinians to distill what they observed about white people. Their descriptions point to individual and cultural pathologies: dehumanizing, pathological narcissism, authoritarian character, greed, cruelty, sadism, the policing of racial borders, paranoia, absence of deserved shame and moral injury. These understandings underline some of the psychosocial tasks before us as white people.