Soul Murder--Tate Burwell

From: Tate Burwell

To: Nell Irvin Painter

 Subject: Soul Murder

Dear Dr. Painter,

Your notes on Soul Murder and Slavery were eye-opening for me. As a black girl who grew up in the south, I thought that I was intimately acquainted with the horrors of slavery. I thought I knew how the horrors manifested themselves in Antebellum culture, how the ideology seeped into our society. Your writing made me realize that my understanding of slavery is flat, one-dimensional, and shallow. My understanding of slavery is one I acquired from textbooks and teachers and American culture in general. It is one that generalizes the slavery experience as “horrible” but leaves it at that so that one does not have to address the complexities of the system. The over-simplification of slavery in America weakens our understanding of what it was like for the enslavers and the enslaved, and causes an unwillingness to discuss the practice because of the erroneous belief that the problems stopped when slavery was abolished. As we advance as a society and gain new knowledge and insights into the human psyche, the subject of slavery will remain relevant as we obtain new ways to understand it and new tools with which to analyze and discuss it. In reading I realized that slaves are never explicitly recognized as people or as Americans, much less American people. Slavery is never recognized for its huge role in the development in our society and economy. Slavery is treated as its own separate story, as opposed to one that is interwoven with the fabric of our nation’s story. When a book is written about the antebellum period, descriptions of Southern Americans center on the slaveholders and plantation life. The Americans described either owned slaves or supported the practice. They never describe the Americans that were enslaved because slaves aren’t thought of in that way—they’re just slaves. This really puts into context the recent push to refer to slaves as “enslaved people” to emphasize their status as humans. Now I get the extent of the dehumanization of enslaved people that persists to this day. What also lingers is the stigma surrounding mental health in the black community. Black people were denied a “psychological personhood”, as you put it, since they arrived in America, and that perception has been hard to shake. It seems revolutionary to refer to the victims of enslavement as the victims of child abuse and sexual harassment, even though the facts have always been readily available. A psychological analysis of slavery makes us face the horrors instead of dismissing them. It also makes us consider a complete emotional spectrum for individuals, challenging the notion that there was a universal slave experience that is easily summarized in a few sentences in a text book. It forces us to actually think about what it would have been like to live in constant fear. To always be neglected, tortured, raped, beaten. Intellectualizing the reality of that is horrifying at the least. For any American alive today the terrible but common details of life in the antebellum period almost don’t feel real—it feels like a bad dream or a horror movie, and we need to change that. People rarely describe the founding fathers as slave holders even though that’s what they were. But if we recognize many slave holders as rapists, child molesters, child abusers, and people who committed acts of sexual harassment and domestic abuse and child neglect, who supported child labor and caused malnutrition then what does that say about these figures who we hold in such high esteem? Accounting for psychological abuse puts these crimes in very real terms. In most circles a grown man even thinking about a thirteen year old in a sexual manner would be cause for shunning and castigation, and he would certainly be labeled as a pedophile. So why does the sexual harassment of a thirteen-year-old girl by a grown man in a position of power not draw the same ire from the public? Because this situation has been normalized. Slave masters sexually abused their slaves. This was a reality of slavery. But that doesn’t mean that we have to treat it as normal or acceptable just because it was a normal aspect of that society. I should have read that sentence and been just as if not more disgusted by it than when I read a Daily Mail article about a man who was sexually attracted to children but didn’t act on it. Why don’t we consider the breaking up of slave families as heinous as kidnapping or as sad as a death in the family? Your writing raises all of these questions that I think are important for us as a nation to answer in order for us to move forward. I think that your more profound examination of events is one that should be incorporated into every discussion of slavery in this country.

Sincerely,

Tate