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Little noticed by those who would form a picket line at the Times were the males of their ethnic cultures accused of treating women in the same manner as
enslavers, Alice Walker and Philip Galanes of the Times had the following exchange during his interview with Ms. Walker. Jan.23, 2016.Times:
AW: Of course. Now I know about the hardships that my father, my grandfather, all of the black men went through. The women too, of course, but I was fascinated by the men. They were totally oppressed by the culture. Lynchings were frequent. I used to wonder why my father always had this look when he went off to town that said, I might not be back. He had to behave in this servile way. And if the white people were drunk, they would abuse him anyway.
PG: And that was their model for treating women?
AW: Enslavement culture was their only model for 300 years. They would be looking at the behavior of brutal white overseers. Did you realize that they used to behead people in our country? They put heads on spikes and lined the rivers to keep enslaved people in complete terror. But it was only later that I knew this. My parents hadn’t permitted me to understand it as a child; they never talked about it.
I took this to mean that black male slaves treated black women slaves the same way that enslavers and overseers treated black women. This is the kind of bizarre over-the-top bourgeoisie feminism that I satirized in my novel, “Reckless Eyeballing. “Frank Sinatra, Saul Bellow groupie Michiko Kakutani said something similar in the Times.
I asked Justin Demangles, chair of The Before Columbus Foundation, Harvard Professor Werner Sollors, Historian James Loewen and Dr. Sam Hamod to respond to whether black male slaves treated black women in the same manner that slave masters and overseers treated black women. Irish director Colm Toibin, was part of the interview and as an example of how black males have been singled out by the corporate bourgeoisie feminists and white males like Galanes to
take the rap for misogyny, Galanes didn’t ask Colm Toibin about how
Irish men treat women. The same way as British soldiers during the occupation of Ireland?
Prof. Werner Sollors
Provoked by a comment in The New York Times to the effect that the behavior of brutal white masters and overseers served as a “model" for the way black men treated black women, Ishmael Reed asked: “Does anyone know whether black male slaves sold their children? Conducted Mengele type experiments on black women and men? Hanged black woman?”
I cannot offhand think of any literary work from before World War II that would represent even remotely similar gruesome scenes. Undoubtedly there was imitation going on in master-slave relations. One only has to think of dances in which slaves mockingly imitated masters, dances that were then imitated by the masters. In abolitionist literature, there are also a few cases in which slaves whipped other slaves. Most famously, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Sambo and Quimbo beat Uncle Tom to death, but they are following Simon Legree’s orders, and, of course, Uncle Tom is a male slave, and one who can hardly be said to imitate anyone except Christ. However, Stowe’s narrator adds a relevant comment on Sambo and Quimbo: “These two colored men were the two principal hands on the plantation. Legree had trained them in savageness and brutality as systematically as he had his bulldogs; and, by long practice in hardness and cruelty, brought their whole nature to about the same range of capacities. It is a common remark, and one that is thought to militate strongly against the character of the race, that the negro overseer is always more tyrannical and cruel than the white one. This is simply saying that the negro mind has been more crushed and debased than the white. It is no more true of this race than of every oppressed race, the world over. The slave is always a tyrant, if he can get a chance to be one.” Stowe lets a scene follow that does illustrate Sambo’s imitative brutalization when he tells a Mulatto woman: “yo my woman now. Yo grind dis yer corn, and get my supper baked, ye har?”
“I an’t your woman, and I won’t be!” said the woman, with the sharp, sudden courage of despair; “you go long!”
“I’ll kick yo, then!” said Sambo, raising his foot threateningly.
“Ye may kill me, if ye choose,—the sooner the better! Wish’t I was dead!” said she.
Before he dies, Uncle Tom still prays for Sambo’s and Quimbo’s souls, and his prayer is heard.
In a lurid scene in Richard Hildreth’s novel Archy Moore, the white master Colonel Moore demands that one slave flog another in front of him, but that slave throws down the whip and refuses to do so. That slave is Cassy, a woman, the slave she refuses to flog is Archie, who is her brother and her husband, and Colonel Moore is the father of both of them. Cassy stops the Colonel when she says in a firm tone, “Master, he is my husband!” Hildreth’s narrator Archy continues: “That word husband, seemed to kindle colonel Moore into a new fury, which totally destroyed his self-command. He struck Cassy to the ground, trampled on her with his feet, and snatching up the whip which she had thrown down, he laid it upon me with such violence, that the lash penetrated my flesh at every blow, and the blood ran trickling down my legs and stood in little puddles at my feet.” Moore’s violence hardly served as a model for Archy.
One last scene I can report is not literary but historical and comes from a recent article by Thomas A. Foster, who reports a 1787 case of an unnamed Maryland slave who raped Elizabeth Amwood, a free black woman (https://muse.jhu.edu/login?type=summary&url=/journals/journal_of_the_history_of_sexuality/v020/20.3.foster.html). The context, however, is one of clear coercion by a white man, William Holland, who, as Foster writes, ordered Amwood to
“Pull up her Close and Lie Down he then Called a Negrow Man Slave” “and ordered him to pull Down his Britches and gitt upon the said Amwood and to bee grate with her.” A fourth individual in this horrific scene, a white man named John Pettigrew, operating with Holland, pointed a pistol at the unnamed enslaved man and Elizabeth Amwood.
It would be difficult to consider such cases examples of slaves modeling their conduct toward women on the brutality of masters and overseers. One waits for the Times to provide a list of examples that must have formed the background for the published comment.
Prof. Sam Hamod
Alice Walker, M H Perry and their twisted use of media to skewer Black Men
We come now to Alice Walker, a fine fiction writer, one I would defend as a fine writer, but sadly, she is not a good psychologist, and that is her downfall. One should realize one’s imitations, and in this case, she has overcooked herself by the way she has skewered Black Men for the media, especially in her novels and worse, in her essays in the New Yorker.
As a poet, I do not pretend to be a judge culturally or psychologically of Arab women, or Muslim women; they may appear in my poems, but I am not about to judge them for their strengths or faults as a psychologist. In the case of Walker, she leans on stereotypes saying that black men imitated slave owners with the way they treated and treat black women. Fortunately, she was not around at the time of slavery, but she is about now, and black men and women, as with other minorities, stress is part of the situation. But we should hang together, not split ourselves asunder as Ms. Walker has done not only in the 90s in the New Yorker, but again recently. I wonder if she needs the attention of her masters who run this anti-black male magazine, or she may need the money; I honestly don’t know why she once again got out her cudgels and flailed against straw black men, damaging herself, her reputation and doing harm to the unity of the black people, especially at a time when black Americans are once again beset by violent and open racism.
This brings me to the other half of this tandem, Melissa Harris-Perry*; who has somehow gotten lighter and lighter skinned and opinionated on TV on MSNBC. Almost nightly, she has become more and more the attack dog for her bosses like Zuker and others, as she condemns black men, by using stereotype after stereotype against her black brothers.
What has gotten into these women? Are they angry that they are not white? Do they need the attention? The money?
I could go on, but this is just a bit of a look at some out of joint women who are doing more harm at this time than good; though they may be feathering their own nest, the harm they do and have done will long live after them unless they straighten out and go for truth and justice rather than making careless shouts filled with false stereotypes that in the end, will injure black men and black women as well.
Prof. James Loewen
Over the years, I've read all the slave narratives in the WPA collection from Mississippi, many from Texas and Illinois and other states, the Fisk collection, and others. I can't remember a single one in which a slave father or "husband" -- the word has to be put in quotes because owners did not take slave marriages seriously, hence slaves couldn't either -- was said to have modeled his behavior toward black women upon that of his owner.
Instead, I recall scenes like this: A man recounts in the 1930s a whipping his younger sister got, after she had accidentally broken a clock. "My old marster took her and tied a rope around her neck — just enough to keep it from choking her — and tied her up in the back yard and whipped her I don't know how long. There stood mother, there stood father, and there stood all the children and none could come to her rescue."
As soon as slavery ended, masses of African Americans in Vicksburg got U.S. army chaplains to legitimize their heretofore semi-legal slave marriages. During Reconstruction, "We is rising!" became the watchword for black families. Most Americans are not really aware of the Nadir of race relations, that terrible period from 1890 to about 1940 when the U.S. went more racist in its ideology than at any other time. Then is when African American morale bent and in some cases shattered, and yes, marriages fell apart, and people misbehaved.
Ishmael Reed, My letter to the Times, which wasn’t published.
Does anyone know whether black male slaves sold their children? (1/3d of slaves on the Lee plantation were bi-racial); conducted Mengele type experiments on black women and men (See: Harriet Washington “Medical Apartheid"); hanged a black woman (Lee’s father Harry Lee hanged a pregnant woman for striking an overseer)? Frank Sinatra fan times Michiko Kakutani said something similar about slave masters and black males' treatment being the same. The times apologized for ignoring the Jewish Holocaust. Are they making up things about the Black Holocaust? That black men and slave masters were equally guilty?
What do former black slaves living in Canada say about the treatment of Does this mean that the overseers were neutral?
Here's the testimony of a Eli Johnson, a black male slave, from The North-Side View of Slavery edited by Benjamin Drew, Pg.385."The next overseer was S--. He kicked a woman's eye out, the first day he came there. He asked her a question in the gin-house, which she did not understand. She said "No, Sir," at a venture. The answer was wrong--she was stooping down, and he kicked her face. It put her eye out. He went to the house for something to put on it. She cried out aloud. Said he, 'Shut up!' I've killed a great many better looking niggers than you, and thrown 'em in the bayou.' This I heard him say myself. Nothing was done about the loss of the eye: the woman's husband dared say nothing about it. In three weeks' time, S--whipped three women and nine men. The talk in the quarters was among some to put him to death; others were afraid to try it. He left before the month was up; another named W--was then overseer".
Justin Desmangles
Excavating the histories of slavery in the New World has been arduous and fraught with peril. Many of its pioneers, Arturo Schomburg, and John Henrik Clarke among them, risked their lives to resuscitate the truth of it. Newer research by David Brion Davis and more recently Edward E. Baptist reveal and increasingly complex picture of the many centuries of the Atlantic Slave Trade. A picture that is only beginning to emerge, being added to each day as new revelations are disclosed and uncovered by colleges and universities throughout the world, as well as independent scholars. None of this seems to matter much to either Alice Walker or Colm Toibin, who indulge in the most crass and cynical use of egregious caricatures depicting black men. Caricatures which dovetail the venal logic still in use today among devout racists to justify the rampant violence inflicted socially, economically, legally and extra-legally, against black men everywhere in the world. When Walker says, "Enslavement culture was their only model for 300 years. They would be looking at the behavior of brutal white overseers," she reveals a depth of ignorance that is remarkable in its capitulation to the most backward and criminal elements of the United States power structure and ironically the very white male patriarchs she otherwise deplores.
As the prodigious research of the above-mentioned scholars has demonstrated, both to fellow academics and interested layman, the panorama of "enslavement culture" was indeed a highly variegated one, with radical diversities within it. Varying widely from region to region, there were myriad classes of slaves involving many dimensions of skill levels spanning multiple disciplines. As Albert Murray tirelessly reminded those who would listen, there were draftsmen, engineers and architects, master builders among the greater slave population, as well as those who performed manual labors. Are we to believe, as Walker bizarrely asserts, that for 300 years (the trade was actually much longer) it is reasonable to assume that the entire male slave population was adopting "brutal white overseers" as a model for their relationships with women? The freakish absurdity of this would be laughable were it not so macabre and eminently dangerous. The notion that somehow or other a trait of violence against women was "bred" into Africans as a result of slavery in the New World has been a favored talking point among white supremacist polemicists for generations. I cannot believe that Walker doesn't know this.
Recently an Atlas of the Atlantic Slave Trade (David Eltis & David Richardson, Yale University Press, 2010) was published. The detailed maps further demonstrate the extraordinary arc of diversity from which the trade drew upon. Most of the enslaved were brought to the Caribbean or further south. As economies flourished and new routes began, expansion of the trade increased each year, again, drawing from broader and broader swaths of Africa and its interior. I would suggest that unless a person already harbors some deep rooted prejudice, it would defy logic, indeed commonsense, to go along with the blanket, all-encompassing foolishness of Walker's ahistorical position on "enslavement culture." To put it country simple, she doesn't know what the hell she's talking about, and Toibin doesn't give a damn. They are driven by an agenda that could not countenance a rigorous description of what they pretend to grasp. An agenda that holds out show-biz success on Broadway and in Hollywood as demonstrable proof of their mutual veracity. Perhaps this aspiration to entertain us on the big screen is part of the game they are playing, using each other's ignorance as a way to pander to the powers they claim to castigate.
Earlier in the piece, Walker even claims, by way of Quincy Jones suggestion, that her novel, The Color Purple, is a blues. Perhaps it did not occur to her that many of the most tender, gentle, evocations of romantic love between a man and woman have been written and later recorded by black bluesmen? That this form was developed and refined in what she calls "enslavement culture"? Stranger still, at another point she falls for, or is it offers up, that shopworn racist canard of Africa-as-a-country, describing her travel there and the vestiges of slavery that continue to the present day. Africa is among the largest of continents on earth, containing a diversity of culture and language found nowhere else. There are more than 50 separate countries. Walker's, what-I-saw-in-Africa, accounts for none of this, just another gross generalization. If she witnessed these atrocities, she has an obligation to truth to tell the world where in Africa, not just Africa. Meanwhile, there is slavery right here at home, not far from the tony restaurants being plugged by the Times (the editors go so far as to let the reader know what Walker and Toibin are eating). See Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies Migrant Farmworkers in the United States by Seth Holmes (University of California, 2013), also Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy by John Bowe (Random House 2007)
