Slavery and its Social Impact, “Social Death”

Note: Posted this because I read scraps of former sanity's blog, This, though, has almost nothing to do with Abraham Lincoln, but everything to do with slavery. Also, this was for class, it might be a bit obvious but there is a paper that I am referencing and critiquing. You need not have read the paper.

Slavery’s repercussions are long lasting and at times, seem to be unconquerable; In American society, we can still feel the impact that this extreme form of domination has left for the many generations that are descendants of ex-slaves. Orlando Patterson, in his paper titled “Slavery and Social Death,” takes the route of analyzing and uncovering what exactly slavery did to the one that was enslaved. He dissects how the relationship between master and slave developed, persisted and that it meant the death, socially, for someone to be enslaved. Patterson explains how the constitution of human relationships is that of the powers of those who are interacting by using definitions and explanations on power given by Weber and Marx. One thing clear about slavery is that it encompassed the domination of a person’s physical and social being by another; it meant that slavery was human interaction of inequality in power at its most extreme.

Patterson explains how there are three facets of power, social, psychological and cultural, that coincide with three distinct features that form slavery. Slavery, he contends, is not only distinct because of the extremity of power and what it implies, but also through “the qualities of coercion that brought the relation into being and sustained it.” In the foremost, slavery was domination through the use of violence, because this violence was crucial in “creating and maintaining the domination,” of the slave by the master. Slavery is a special case of using might or violence in a society of stratified classes; it meant that the initial act of violence had to be repeated by the master to ensure that slave numbers did not lessen through death or freedom. Not only was violence, through the use of the whip, necessary to ensure “original accumulation” of slaves but it was also required to motivate the slaves to work, “by the need to reinforce reward with the threat and actuality of punishment.” The Marxists understood the need for this use of force to keep the master and slave relationship in check but so did a North Carolina judge, Thomas Ruffian who clarified that intentional wounding of a slave by his hirer was all right.

The powerlessness that was a feature of a slave originated in the fact that slavery was a replacement for death. This is explained by the fact that the slave was alive as long he “acquiesced in his powerlessness.” A slave in essence had no social worth or value, he was a social non-person without his master; this was the second feature of enslavement. It meant the natal alienation of the person from society took away any and all rights. The slave was a person of isolation and socially nonexistent because he had no formally recognized claim to anything or anyone in the society. He had no relations, no formal bonds to anyone; he was not a father, wife or child. Informal relationships existed but marriages between slaves, mother-child, or sibling relationships had no formal or social value placed on them in a slave society. The natal alienation because a slave had no ties to anything through birth or any claim to anyone, led to the third aspect of slavery. This aspect was one where the person who was a slave had lost his honor, the dishonored nature of a slave spoke volumes. An enslaved being had nothing to defend so where was his honor? He had none because honor means one has power and in slavery, the slave has no power, it is the power of the master he relied on.

Slavery, one can look back in time and see, was one of the most despicable human relationships or forms of interaction that allowed for one man to dominate over another and essentially take over the person’s entire being. Patterson uses powerful examples to demonstrate how this relationship was created and sustained. Slavery meant the effective use of violence by the master to destroy any and all social ties of the slave, and create a being that had no worth or place in society except to the one who was his master. Slavery was meant to achieve the complete domination of a person, by killing and destroying the person’s honor, pride to create the only place in society for that person through having a master. It is sickening to look back at what people did to another human and what happened in the lives of so many because of slavery.