I just read a diary chastising Bill O’Reilly for his comments about the slaves who built the White House being “well fed and housed by the government.” While the tone of the diary and the comments are admirable, they tend to revolve around the notion that being well fed and housed being a terrible trade-off for freedom. While this is very true, it misses the core lie in O’Reilly’s statement.
It is very common for average Americans (and even Europeans) to argue that slaves were “well taken care of,” since they were “valuable property.” Implicitly, they ignore the fact that slaves were people, with the same abilities and capacity for free thought as their masters. Unlike mules or dogs, they could cook, clean, and feed themselves. Unlike dogs, they wouldn’t forgive their masters selling off their children.
Slave owners didn’t do work themselves. That’s why they had slaves. Slaves did _all_ the work. They kept the animals and bred them. They slaughtered them. They cooked them. They gathered the food in the fields. They had to hunt _without weapons_ (using snares and such) to supplement their diet. They had to build those shacks they lived in when they could take time away from building those historic homes still standing in the south. They made their own clothes after making and mending their owner’s clothes. They picked the cotton to make the clothes. They made the liquor, they did the iron work, they shooed the horses, they cut down the trees, they made the lumber, they built bridges and roads, etc. They wet nursed their owner’s babies, to the detriment of their own. They looked after their owner’s children, while their own worked in the fields and had no protection from adults of any race. They did _everything_.
House slaves slept on the floor next to their masters’ and mistresses’ beds. When their owners woke up in the middle of the night to take a piss, they got the chamber pot, held it, and helped them. Their owners literally didn’t take piss without their help.
Slaves did all the work, the European community took the best of it, and slaves were left with the dregs of what they themselves made. That’s what slavery was. It wasn’t being a pet. There was no protection, no taking care of. They didn’t get taken to the doctor when injured or sick. Another slave with skills in that area did that. Slaves took care of their owners, their owner’s friends, their owner’s servants, etc. And what they produced enriched all of white society. It created the majority of America’s wealth.
They had to do all this while deliberately pretending to be unable to learn to read or reason, because that would at best make whites feel bad for explicitly treating them like dumb animals (see writings and justifications at the time), and at worst make them seem dangerous and in need of “correction.” Which is the other important aspect of slaves being ordinary people. Owners could not be kind. They had to be inhuman. That’s what it takes to deprive thinking, feeling people of their livelihood, their families, and even the right to their own bodies.
Bill O’Reilly perpetuates the same bigoted notion that allowed whites to enslave millions of people, meaning to do it in perpetuity and throughout their generations, while still thinking of themselves as generally good people. It presupposes that black people on their own are helpless, and need to be taught how to be proper human beings. Even the language puts the burden on the enslaved rather than the enslavers. When we make their enslavement their identity, only referring to them as slaves and not as men and women, it makes owning slaves as passive as owning a tractor. But the owners, their overseers, the whole of the American political structure, and most of its society had to sustain active and concerted efforts to keep African Americans from escaping their abuse.
Those men and women had to be hurt just as badly as any of you would to be kept from the fruits of their labors. They weren’t any less capable, any less bright, any less determined, or any less strong willed than you. In fact, they probably had to be more of all those things than any of us today just to survive being shipped to America like cargo in chains. Think about what you would do to keep people from taking your children. They tried it. It just didn’t work. Much as a woman I once knew said of her past abusive relationship, “It wasn’t that I didn’t fight back. It was that I kept losing.” Property owning white men of the south were required to participate in slave militias precisely because the African Americans kept fighting to be free. They just kept losing.
Enslavers provided nothing of value to the people they treated as property. Instead they took, leaving their slaves just enough to live off of. So little that other races died from the conditions. Africans were a last resort, after trying First Nation people, Indians (that’s why there’s Indian communities in the Caribbean), and poor whites (though only as indentured servants, recent Irish slave myths not withstanding). The only thing owners provided were overseers and enough torture and killing to keep slaves from trying to stop them from taking everything.
In a world where we don’t think about how we actually get our food and where it comes from, where most of us don’t think about what it takes to build a house, it’s easy to talk about slaves being “fed and housed.” But people in New World colonies didn’t go down to the supermarket to buy food. They raised animals and crops, prepared food, and cooked it. They didn’t buy pre-made houses or even land. They killed First Nation people and drove them off the land, then built houses on the land for their exclusive use. They cleared forests to make fields for crops.
Do you really think they had slaves build the house, but kept the pigs, slaughtered them, butchered them for bacon, and made breakfast themselves? No. Slaves did all of that, too.
Slavery was not simply working for free. It was not like the company store. It was being held captive, then being forced to give over everything good in your life that you ever made or chanced upon to your owner. Including your significant other and your children. It was being chained to a bed and regularly raped as a practice of “breeding” the slaves. It was not being _allowed_ to marry. The white community during slavery did everything serial killers do today. Including horrific torture and killing. There are people today with strips of skin their relatives collected as “souvenirs” from lynchings.
America is a strong nation today because it had a strong economy right after its independence. The south was _by far_ the core of that economy, and that economy ran on slavery. Everything was dependent on it. Slaves didn’t provide a limited service to the white community while depending on white services. Every facet of industry, every type of product or good, every aspect of human society in the south involved slaves in some capacity. For hundreds of years, America’s white society enriched itself by taking all the natural resources away from First Nation people and all the work and ideas away from African slaves. This nation has a very, very long history of taking enormous wealth, both tangible and intangible, from people of color and transferring that wealth to European immigrants. Not the other way around.