The top story for Nicolle Wallace’s Deadline: White House, in the 5:00 p.m. A block, was the story of a woman from Texas by the name of Abigail Jo Shry. An apparent Trump fan, she called into the chambers of Tanya Chutkan, the judge overseeing Trump’s January 6th trial. The woman threatened Judge Chutkin’s life, but not before calling Chutkan a “slave n* * * * * *” as a means of setting Chutkan apart.
Especially of note is the use of ‘slave’ as an adjective, almost an intensifier but primarily a label of essence, that Chutkan has been preordained and destined for such a station in life, even in this day and age where slavery has been abolished and is no more.
The use also echoes Susan Lorincz, the female killer in Florida who called the children of her Black female neighbor ‘slaves’ before shooting the mother dead. That type of automatic association, I daresay, is spread from at least Texas to Florida but probably gets little play in the North and other areas of the country where slavery wasn’t a mainstay.
I’d noted the Florida case of the woman luring her neighbor to her death when I discussed recently Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s defense of his state changing their eighth-grade social studies materials to newly reflect the idea that enslaved persons derived personal benefit from their condition:
By getting people to argue over such absurd but trivial differences about this little bit about slavery or that, those engaged in the various debates will begin to look around them in their own environs and start categorizing others according to that terrible shorthand and rule of thumb: Black people were slaves, Whites were not.
This far-too-simplified key of social cartography automatically objectifies people; but, more than that, it trains those engaged in such categorization to keep doing it until it becomes second nature.
Again, I come from almost as far north as you can get in this country, Michigan. Growing up, in my middle- and high-school years, I was called out of my name to my face by classmates three times (a very small number, when I think back on it, though of course each use stood out). I’d never, ever been called ‘slave’, and I highly doubt that it would have crossed my classmates’ minds to bring that word out of their mouths. It’s just not a natural reach. But for these two women, Abigail Shry and Susan Lorincz, in two different states, the word came rather readily. In fact, it was the word of choice.
Kenan Malik, in a Guardian article published in January, relayed this (and I emphasize):
Most people assume that racism emerges when members of one race begin discriminating against members of another. In fact, the opposite is the case: intellectuals and elites began dividing the world into distinct races to explain and justify the differential treatment of certain peoples. The ancestors of today’s African Americans were not enslaved because they were black. They were deemed to be racially distinct, as black people, to justify their enslavement.
Shry labels and identifies Chutkan right away, boxing her in and pigeonholing her as a slave in essence, so as to justify the abuse and threats that she issues thereafter. Slaves are things; they are not people. Once someone has been reduced to the level of a thing, they can be manipulated or destroyed according to the whims of people. This is the amazing mutability of labels: they change how we view people, and thus they change how we treat people.
Joel Kovel, in White Racism: A Psychohistory (p. xliii), says:
Aggression connotes a force applied irrespective of its object, or, in psychoanalytic parlance, an instinct freely [displaceable] from one object to another. Violence, on the other hand, connotes the violation of another’s being, defined in relation to the self; it is harm [occurring] within, or to, an existing social framework. What is distinctive about racism is not that white people came along and happened to discharge their aggression on black people, as though the blacks were idle stones lying around waiting to be kicked. They may have been, in white fantasy, turned into such creatures; but that is not the heart of the matter. The racist relation is one, rather, in which the white self is created out of the violation of the black self, through its inclusion and degradation. Racism degrades the Other to constitute the dominant self, and its social order.
Shry’s father, Mark, came to his daughter’s defense, describing her in court as a “non-violent alcoholic.” Surely he meant to emphasize the first word so as to minimize the violence embedded in her threats. But also he admits to her imperfections, labeling Shry so that we see her differently.
In those oft-cited deaths of despair that sociologists and others are fond of highlighting, Shry would be among them should she continue on her path. She lies on a couch and drinks all day, yelling at the television on account of what politicians do. We should take pity on her, her father is communicating. Let me relabel her, he says to the courts: now see her anew.
Ultimately, the alcoholism is held up as some sort of talisman that expunges her responsibility. And once alcohol is the demon here, then the character flaw of racism also disappears from Shry’s column; she no longer can be held to account on that front. All of that behavior can be reduced to this possessing spirit.
But we must remember that Shry not only has a history of calling in such death threats, she specifically derogated Judge Chutkan to a position beneath her. She has taken Chutkan’s elevated position of judge and removed it, placing herself in judgment of Chutkan, stripping her of all dignity and putting her on notice that she is mortal, and that, instead of Chutkan being able to pass sentence on others, it is Shry who has determined that the judge’s very days may be numbered.
In doing so, Shry assumes a God-like role in the evocation. She has exchanged places and is no longer the woman afflicted with alcoholism—she possesses the power to declaim life or death. She has reclaimed the position of power that her skin color should have bestowed to her in a race-based society, if only we were back in a time when slavery still existed. This is why Shry uses the term ‘slave’ — to reclaim her white self.
Now that she’s arrested and held, I’m sure Shry regrets her position, where she finds herself. But make no mistake: she intended to do what she did. Charles W. Mills, in The Racial Contract (pp. 58-59), stipulated that
Whiteness is defined in part in respect to an oppositional darkness, so that white self-conceptions of identity, personhood, and self-respect are then intimately tied up with the repudiation of the black Other.
Shry called in that threat in order to align herself with Trump, who is increasingly seen in MAGA world as the champion and savior of what it means to be white. Thus it was imperative for Shry to repudiate Judge Chutkan, both for Chutkan’s legal power over Trump himself and her social power over Shry and others like her. And I guarantee that Shry does not feel bad for committing these actions, only that she is being held to account for them.