Part II: “Nigger” and The Retrenchment of Citizenship
“I was never going to be anybody's nigger again . . . [b]ut I was now to discover that the world has more than one way of keeping you a nigger.”
James Baldwin
Nigger: 1. Disparaging and Offensive. a) a black person. b) a member of any dark skinned people. 2. a second-class citizen.
Purposefully or simply through association, the N-word has become analogously connected with black people, blackness, black image, and limited citizenship. Indeed, Webster's Dictionary defines “nigger” as a black person and second-class citizen. While most Americans understand the word to be one of the vilest expressions in the English lexicon, it nevertheless continues to find its way into popular culture by whites, blacks, and Latinos. Last year at Harvard Law School, for example, the word found its way into hate mail directed at a black woman in her first year of legal study. The history of “nigger,” its social power, as well as its function, predates Kennedy's treatment of the subject as its emergence into popular imagination reaches strategically and substantively to the antebellum period. Felix Haywood, a former slave, when interviewed by *140 the writers dispatched through the Works Progress Administration, recalls, “Abe Lincoln freed the nigger with the gun and the trigger.” The incredible power of the word is grounded in the very framework of the development of America and the political and economic expediency of slavery.
Racial epithets of all sorts have the power to wound, embarrass, humiliate, and denigrate their intended targets. In his groundbreaking work on the psychology of prejudice, Howard Ehrlich, categorized racial epithets, or “ethnophaulisms,” into three distinct categories, arguing that such terms create verbal pictures and negative stereotypes. Moreover, African Americans are not the exclusive targets of derisive speech. Hate speech directed at Jewish persons, Latinos, Asians, and now Arab Americans, demonstrates this quite clearly. In a persuasive and often-cited article, Professor Mari Matsuda, a leading critical race theorist, argues that racist speech is “harmful because it is a mechanism of subordination,” reifying a “historical vertical relationship.” These vertical relationships remind minoritised groups of their marginalization and sometimes powerlessness or subordination within a society with a “dominant culture.” This is particularly and sadly true in the United States. Legally and *141 otherwise, we have attached notions of inferiority to particular groups and perpetuated the “structural subordination of a group” based on its racial distinctions, where the verticality of relationships is exemplified by whites on top and people of color on the bottom.
Theoretically, the purpose behind the creation and use of racial epithets is the reinforcement (psychologically and otherwise) of the perception of weakness, immorality, inadequacy, or ineptitude of the intended target. “Nigger” reminds blacks of an unshakeable “otherness,” an outsider status in the larger social, economic, and political dynamics of a given society. This outsider status finds its origins in involuntary servitude, which was justified through the creation of “nigger”: the indolent, heathenish, wretched individual, legally on par with chattel. Quite intentionally, “nigger” was the proverbial scapegoat, a political and economic creation used to justify slavery and the carnal brutality inflicted upon slaves. That Kennedy omitted this analysis was perhaps *142 one of his more significant scholarly oversights. Kennedy's most significant reference to slavery is in a short passage--a few lines--quoting a short passage from Harriet Jacobs's poignant autobiography. Harriet Jacobs's story is incredibly enlightening. In my scholarship, and in this essay, I refer to her groundbreaking memoir, as it is a unique social and legal reference for those studying the experiences of slave women. With access to such a remarkable exposition on chattel relationships, sexism, the exploitation of slaves, and the powerful imagery of “nigger” in connection with blackness during the antebellum South, it is surprising that Kennedy did not offer more.
First, the reader is not significantly educated about the political, psychological and social transition of “nigger” from the 1600s to its antebellum usage, and its evolution through reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement to its present complex and layered reality. Kennedy gives up too quickly (by page five), claiming that no one really “knows precisely how or when niger turned derisively into nigger and attained a pejorative meaning.” In my interview with Professor Kennedy on February 15, 2002, he recognized the value of investigating and analyzing the transformation of the N-word, however, he also acknowledged the omission of such analysis from his book. The book's weakness is revealed in this omission because it wrongfully assumes the reader can place “nigger” in its historical place and that its deeper sociological significance is obvious.
Second, it is curious how issues of gender are virtually invisible in Kennedy's book (other than the occasional reference with a severe tone). Kennedy's oversight is significant here. After all, black women are a part of the racial and N-word equation. Is the realm of discourse on pejorative race words an exclusively male enterprise, both on receiving and projecting ends? Black women have been the targets of racial hatred in America and continue to be cast in demeaning and distorted images. There is a subtle irony to this omission, as *143 the target of racial derision at Harvard Law School, shortly after the publication of Nigger, was a black female first-year law student. Kennedy does note however, in chapter four, Pitfalls In Fighting Nigger, that “the stigmatization of nigger has unavoidably created an atmosphere in which people may be tempted to make false charges in order to exploit the feelings of sympathy, guilt, and anger.” He suggests that Tawana Brawley took advantage of the American public in this way.
A. The Absence of Political Identity: Language, Law & Perception
De courts er dis land is not for niggers . . . . It seems to me when it come to trouble, de law an' a nigger is de white man's sport, an' justice is a stranger in them precincts, an' mercy is unknown.
Although less explored in the context of hate speech, racial epithets--and the word “nigger” in particular--help to shape our notions and understanding of citizenship. Socially and politically, “nigger” reminds us of the compromised status of blacks in the United States and how they have historically been dispossessed of the freedoms, liberties, rights, and privileges enjoyed by white Americans. That America's forefathers debated whether blacks were worthy *144 of citizenship, and ultimately decided that they were undeserving, is formula and precedent by which critical race theorists suggest that blacks continue to be judged. By doing so, those who helped to shape America's moral character, criminal laws, religious ideology, policies, and legal doctrine, seemingly and irreparably distinguished blacks as subjects, rather than citizens. In this way, blacks were objects to be acted upon rather than autonomous actors or individuals to whom rights attached.
Justice Taney's opinion in the Dred Scott case is informative on this point. The Chief Justice concluded that blacks, freed or not, “had no rights whites were bound to respect.” In this seminal decision, Taney struck down the Missouri Compromise and made it clear that all blacks, free or enslaved, were not and could never become citizens of the United States. Taney opined, “the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it.” The High Court's opinion remains hauntingly unambiguous. The Court held that “it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted” the Declaration of Independence. In describing the evolution of “nigger,” I wish to present several key ideas: the necessary synonymy between black and “nigger,” the compromised status of black citizenship, the biological explanations used to justify legal and social subordination of blacks, and the racially gendered aspect of slavery and citizenship.
Language aided in the social and political caricaturing of blacks. *145 Numerous early American advertisements and other media illustrate this point. The “Jolly Nigger” Toy Savings Bank was a popular depository of coins, created by the Hamilton and Matthews Company. Their advertisements depicted a brown skinned man, with large red lips, bow tie, broad nose, and smiling face. Above him, the caption reads: “Jolly Nigger.” Well-known authors discovered and enjoyed the cultural ascendancy and distancing from blacks with celebrity usage of “nigger.” Agatha Christie's famous play, and later movie, Ten Little Indians, was originally entitled “Ten Little Niggers.” From advertisements selling varnishes for shoes to posters and announcements for bowls and books, the word “nigger” was commonly and exclusively associated with images of black children, women and men. After all, “niggers” were not aliens, foreign beings landing in the United States from another planet. Rather, they were black children, women, and men living in America. The normalization of “nigger” was revealed in linguistic expression, caricature, and cartoon, expressly directed at ordinary blacks. According to Richard Moore, the use of terms like “nigger” serves to “mark this people by virtue of their color for a special condition of oppression, degradation, exploitation, and annihilation.”
The characteristics used to socially define “nigger” mirror those invoked to justify the subordination of blacks; the two, even according to definitions in Webster's Dictionary, are synonymously linked. Webster's Dictionary, a most recognized reference source, identifies the parallel between “nigger,” black, and *146 second class citizenship. It defines “nigger” as an offensive word, referring to a black person and second-class citizen. On the other hand, legally, “citizen” was synonymous with “white” and “the words ‘people of the United States,”’ according to Justice Taney, as he suggested they “are synonymous terms, and mean the same thing.” Indeed, whites would not assume that the term applied to them, even if said in their presence. “Nigger” has the obvious connotation of black, and the political and legal force of second-class citizenship.
Arguably, both myths about blacks and “nigger image” are by-products of the ideology of white supremacy. Consider for example that the crafted image of “nigger” was buttressed against propaganda of white civility, virginity, and decorum. Accordingly, blacks were labeled and imaged as sinister heathens, cast out by God, intellectually inferior, deceitful, whorish, over-sexed, criminal by nature, and untrustworthy. Joel Kovel describes how these images would equally come to define blackness and therefore nigger. He refers to the Oxford English Dictionary as depicting blackness as being stained with dirt, dirty, foul, “having dark or deadly purposes, malignant . . . sinister . . . wicked.” Franz Fanon speaks to the “nigger image” of blacks being cast as evil and devilish. Again, by contrast, whites were considered “God's overseers,” invested with the moral authority to bring religion to the slaves and correct their immoral ways. *147 This dichotic imagery proved to be powerful in America as notions of black degeneracy and white supremacy were culturally internalized and transcended generations throughout the antebellum period, Reconstruction, and the twentieth century. Its message helped to shape cultural attitudes about blacks that are yet to disappear. Delgado and Stefancic address this, arguing that during the turbulent Reconstruction period, stereotypes of black “brutish[ness]” and hypersexuality justified the Ku Klux Klan's reign of terror as they lynched 2,500 blacks between 1885 and 1900. Kennedy does not address the synonymy *148 issue, which warrants critique and scholarly study if we are to truly “trace” the N-word, its power, and legal force in the United States.
The duality and interchangeability of blackness and “nigger” are powerfully illustrated and conveyed through depictions in movies, posters, books, and other media. Kennedy, however, does not challenge or enlighten the reader with illustration or discussion. Nonetheless, this issue is critical in our social understanding of the meaning of “nigger” and why “nigger” has such a powerful meaning in both law and society. The grotesque images caricatured over the labeling of “nigger” gave image to the term “nigger” that was exclusively black. The word's derisive meaning was associated with blackness and black face. Its unshakeable tag for blacks is perhaps found in its history.
B. Citizenship & Economy
The founding of American citizenship implicitly relied upon the denial of citizenship to those of African descent. This was most expediently achieved through the collective negative imaging of blacks. Historians comment that blacks were perceived as too immature, too unsophisticated, and too intellectually inferior to properly exercise the rights granted to citizens, including the right to vote, receive fair wages, contract, and individual autonomy. They were considered an “inferior class of beings” who had to be “subjugated by the dominant race,” holding no rights except those the government might choose to give them. Olmsted, for example, commented on the superficial “childlike” relationship between blacks and whites. Essential to the sanctioning and political health of slavery and the protection of white landowners' interests were the denial of black citizenship and other exclusions. Thus, although laboring and living in America, blacks were without placement and political identity in the United States. Blacks' lack of political identity and recognition had both *149 psychological as well as economic implications for both blacks and whites.
The economic empowerment and growth of the United States depended upon the unpaid labor of African slaves, and as slavery was “an essential part of the original Constitution,” blacks were relegated to the status of chattel or property. Slavery became the source for the economic power and growth of the United States. Not only through sales in cotton, tobacco, sugar, hemp (for rope making), and other agricultural crops in the south, slavery also had a presence in the American North (“black bondage had long been legal in all 13 colonies when the American Revolution began”). Slaves were bought, sold, used for collateral, and listed as assets in bankruptcy petitions.
Slavery itself was more easily justifiable if blacks, in popular cultural imagination and legal texts, possessed infantile and unsavory attributes. Thomas Jefferson referred to slaves in terms of chattel and animals, suggesting that they possessed dull imaginations, were tasteless, and were foul in odor. As slaves, *150 lacking voting power, credit power, and access to education, blacks would not possess the means legally or socially to move themselves beyond servitude. They were, according to Justice Taney, “an unfortunate race.” By contrast, poor whites, while certainly experiencing a compromised status in America, were nonetheless able to benefit economically--even if marginally--from the absolute subjugation of blacks. Moreover, they were not considered chattels within the law or society. As suggested by W.E.B. Du Bois, this quagmire was not wholly unintentional, as the concept of racial superiority would psychologically compensate poor whites, by providing “public and psychological wage” and thereby diametrically positioning black inferiority in counterbalance to collective white dominance. When Cheryl Harris refers to whiteness as property, she speaks to a stock, which needs no investment from whites, but provides economic, political, and social returns for their particular group. Buttressed against that is the unshakably distorted image of blackness; if whiteness is property, blackness is “niggerness.”
Kovel's groundbreaking study of psychology and history in the United States addresses the cultural symbolism of images, ideas, systems and institutions. Like Robert Jay Lifton, he uses the term “psychohistory” to describe the integration of history and psychology. Kovel, however, focuses on the unconscious meaningfulness of culture as a synthetic organism, rather than historical functions of national character. Thus, as he investigated racism in America, he scrutinized the embeddedness of images in cultural meanings. Profoundly imbedded within the American psyche are the fantasy-laden images of black depravity, hypersexuality, aggressivity, and inferiority. Consider, for example, that Thomas Watson, although a former leader of the Southern Populists, would later comment that blacks had “no comprehension of virtue, honesty, truth, gratitude and principle.” According to Watson, the best way to address a black person's misdeeds was to “lynch him occasionally, and flog him, now and then, to keep him from blaspheming the Almighty, by his conduct, on account of his smell and his color.” In hindsight, one can observe that these *151 images emanated from what some psychoanalysts might refer to as infantile “fantasies” and obsessions.
The guilt from manufacturing human slavery and sexual conquering could be justified or at least mitigated through the creation and punishment of a scapegoat. Slavery was obsessively dependent upon the “nigger” myth, which happened to be “the object” of its fruitfulness, but also its prejudice. These ubiquitous images (of “nigger”) became the scapegoats for whites' sexual insecurity, anger, and guilt. A common practice associated with lynchings was the castration of black men. Several states codified laws specifically reserving castration for blacks. Historians comment that the widespread anxiety against *152 blacks lead to the most gruesome expressions found in castration. According to Kovel, the dominant race that Justice Taney refers to “must not only keep the needed object of his hatred oppressed; he must also ensure that this other person enact those very traits that [he] needs to see in him.” In this way, “the anti-Semite must create his Jew; the white bigot, his nigger.” Prejudice in this context is heaped upon an objectified and powerless “safe object” just as younger siblings are attacked in place of the feared parent. The historical affects of hatred and moralism that flowed from race fantasies (about “nigger”) can be found in socio-legal culture. Black Codes, Jim Crow segregationist policies, eugenics, and Dixiecratism powerfully illustrate the dominance of racial fantasies about blacks or the “nigger image.” These images are contemporarily viewed in media representations of welfare moms, teen drug use, and racial violence.
James Fox, a significant contributor to race, poverty, and citizenship discourse, suggests that despite abolitionist efforts to reconceive a constitution that provided rights for slaves in America, slavery was a fundamental part of establishing our nationhood. Cheryl Harris notes, “slavery was the primordial site of the production of racial patriarchy” in the United States, which described “social, political, economic, legal and conceptual system that entrenched the ideology of white supremacy.” According to Hymam and Wiecek, fear of slave revolts, political compromises, and taxation further motivated a number of constitutional clauses. Indeed, it is suggested that slavery either directly or indirectly by ten clauses in the constitution. These articles include: Article I, *153 Section 2, articulating three-fifths (3/5) representation; Article I, Section 8, which permits Congress to order militia to thwart slave rebellion; and Article IV, Section 2, the Fugitive Slave Clause.
Crucial to the creation of citizenship for whites and “nigger image” of blacks, particularly women, were the development of anti-miscegenation legislation and the denial of inheritance through the father's bloodline as had been an essential part of English common law tradition. Paul Finkelman reminds us that in early Virginia, comparatively fewer white women settled, therefore, white men engaging in sexual relationships often did so with black slaves. These contacts were by no means legally uncomplicated as they were often nonconsensual, children were born of these encounters, and black women were legally on par with animals. The moral and psychological dimensions of this issue have yet to become part of a substantive scholarly dialogue. Although dozens of thousands of blacks, and perhaps significantly more, were born to white fathers, who were often connected to plantations (owners, overseers, or their relatives), they were cast as illegitimate and inherited citizenship according to their mothers' slave status.
In 1662, Virginia led the slave states with differentiating the citizenship of future sons and daughters of the United States. This Virginia act provided:
Wheras some doubts have arrisen (sic) whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro women should be slave or ffree (sic), Be it therfore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shalbe (sic) held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother, And that if any christian shall committ (sic) ffornication (sic) with a negro man or women, hee(sic) or shee soe (sic) offending shall pay double the ffines (sic) imposed by the *154 former act.
Cheryl Harris explains that this Act and similar others were designed to “guarantee that the property in whiteness remained pure and inviolate,” but more importantly, that the slaveholders would not suffer economic loss through their sexual misadventures with black slave women. Citizenship was naturally coveted as it conferred rights, privileges, and social legitimacy, which became critically important in the “new world.” Social and political legitimacy continues to be important, and some commentators suggest that blacks remain at the margins of legitimate and socially embraced citizenship. Without citizenship, even the black children of white fathers were relegated to what Derrick Bell refers to as the “bottom of the well.”
C. Rationalizing “Nigger:” Through the Religious and Political Looking Glass
1. Biological and Social Status Inferiority and the Evolution of “Nigger”
Amid growing tensions about the morality of slavery, southern plantation owners, politicians, and others experiencing the positive economic upside of African enslavement were in an ethical conundrum. How could they justify human enslavement? Staunch abolitionists challenged the very foundation of slavery, attacking it as being morally reprehensible, ethically unsound, and evil. Reports of torture, the raping of slave women, girls and men, the excision of appendages, and other abuses were making their way not only north, but also abroad. Kennedy errs in his inability to recognize or give voice to the violence *155 associated with “nigger.” Blassingame compares the sadism at some plantations to that of the guards in German concentration camps. Beyond the need to keep slaves alive, he comments, “[a]buse, constant floggings, cruelty, overwork and short rations were part of the slave's daily life.”
But, it is perhaps here, in light of the violence wedded to the institution of slavery, that the personification of “nigger” became imbedded in the legal, social, religious, and psychological imagination of Americans to justify the peculiar institution. To reinforce the morality of slavery and inferiority of blacks, biological traits of African Americans were endowed with “sufficient cultural meaning” to support the system of social stratification. Blacks were, according to the myth, inferior by all measures. But the strength of the myth was found in biological explanations, which invoked the use of pseudo-science, and were nonetheless supported by the law through what Harris refers to as a racially gendered construct. The continuation of slavery required a system of subordination that was not easily “exitable,” thus making biological markers useful forms of cultural differentiation. Skin color and colorism (the further internalization of color differentiation by blacks) were therefore infused with significant power and meaning. The “advantage of immutability” rested in its promise of stability. The impossibility of overcoming skin color was advantageous to whites as privileges associated with whiteness could be easily limited to whites, and the system of black subordination could be easily replicated. Moreover, the possibility of escape through miscegenation was destabilized by the reinforcement of cultural distinctions, anti-miscegenation laws, and other legal prohibitions.
J.M. Balkin further explicates the binary social stratification between blacks and whites through status group theory, which leads to the exacerbation of cultural stereotypes that exist beyond the debunking of biological differences. His argument provides an alternative theory to help explain the tenacity of “nigger myth.” Like critical feminist theorists, he explains that these identities are relational, defined in part by their position to the other. He argues that social status is the degree of honor, prestige, or recognition that groups or individuals enjoy. Accordingly, the prestige involves “the approval, respect, *156 admiration, or positive qualities imputed to a person or group.”
Positive social status in this case translates into the fantasy of racial and moral superiority by whites or what some scholars refer to as whiteness ideology. Correspondingly, subordinate status confers negative qualities, and in the case of “nigger,” slothfulness, laziness, disobedience, hypersexuality, dishonesty, and inferiority. Although social status can be mutable, its relational balance, in this case to whiteness, has been firmly ensconced in the American imagination. The inescapable feature of “nigger” is that it transcended language and conferred image and status, while maintaining social and legal support. Once one understands what her society thinks of her, she need not be called the disparaging epithet to understand her place, particularly when it is clearly written in how the State and her fellow citizens respond to her. Thus, the real power or force of “nigger” was its cultural and biological association with blackness, which as discussed infra, has survived slavery, as obviously whites believed in the power of what they created.
In one of the most respected studies about slavery, John Blassingame shares how masters first attempted to demonstrate their moral and intellectual superiority over blacks:
Many masters tried first to demonstrate their own authority over the slave and then the superiority of all whites over blacks. They continually told the slave he was unfit for freedom, that every slave who attempted to escape was captured and sold further South, and that the black man must conform to the white man's every wish. The penalties for non-conformity were severe; the lessons uniformly pointed to one idea: the slave was a thing to be used by the “superior” race.
By necessity, the myth had to apply to all blacks, otherwise, why not set all blacks free and provide citizenship to those who seemed less inferior and trustworthier? While this does not explain the psychological force behind abandoning and selling one's children, perhaps the political pressure to maintain the institution of slavery offers some insight. Biological inferences made about the “inherent” degenerative nature of blacks, thereby positioned them as beyond spiritual redemption or true rehabilitation. At best, blacks could be taught to be obedient, to be subservient, to be faithful to their masters, and to behave like happy children enjoying their work.
The creation of “nigger” tooled white supremacy, but more importantly, it was crucial to the early political stability in the United States and the Southern economy. To explicate, Congressman Albert Gallatin Brown of Mississippi, in *157 the winter of 1854, announced to the United States Congress that enslavement of blacks was of a divine origin, and “that it is a great moral, social, and political blessing--a blessing to the slave, and a blessing to the master.” Without the black slaves, the Southern economy, which was agriculturally driven, would have collapsed, as it did in the years following the Civil War. Clearly, hard physical field labor was beyond what whites were willing to assume (even though there were white slaves in the United States).
2. Religious Endorsement of the Myth
Critical to the development and maintenance of this image was religious support for African American enslavement. Although Kennedy does not address this point, it seems critical to a more in-depth investigation of the word's resilience, meaning, and power. “Nigger image,” arguably, helped to justify the ongoing, pervasive legal subordination of blacks. It was essential to the health of the Southern economy that black slavery and slaves themselves not be interfered with, nor economic prosperity impeded. Consequentially, religious tolerance and acceptance became key factors in perpetuating the myth of black inferiority and the evolution of “nigger” in order to sustain slavery. Slavery itself caused considerable tension among religious groups, but ultimately southern clergymen launched a broad campaign to show their support for the enterprise. While stereotypes took various forms, a collective myth emerged that considered blacks not only biologically inferior, but also spiritually depraved. The myth was supported and perpetuated by religious institutions as well as by the law of the *158 time. Abolitionists who fought to articulate the immoralities of slavery commonly found themselves cast from churches.
As Blassingame noted, during the 1830s nearly every state convention of Southern churches “ended with blistering attack[s] on . . .abolitionists.” Arguably, slavery may have been unavoidable for some ministers as their relatives owned them and the churches to which they ministered, acting as corporate bodies, purchased slaves. In some cases the master was essentially transmogrified into God's representative. In one of the more famous exegesis, Thomas Bacon reminds slaves that disobedience to masters is equal to sinning against God:
Poor creatures! You little consider, when you are vile and neglectful of your master's business--when you steal, and waste, and hurt any of their substance-- when you are saucy and impudent--when you are telling them lies, and deceiving them . . . [that] what faults you are guilty of towards your masters and mistresses, are faults done against God himself, who hat set your masters and mistresses over you in His own stead, and expects that you will do for them just as you would do for Him. And pray do not think that I want to deceive you when I tell you that your masters and mistresses are God's Overseers, and that, if you are faulty towards them, God himself will punish you severely for it in the next world . . . for God himself hath declared the same.
As Engerman and Fogel explain, the acceptance of slavery, and the myth about blacks transcended both the secular and religious worlds. The Catholic Church, for example, owned slaves, but it was not alone. Bishops, ministers and elders of other religions also purchased and sold slaves. Slavery became a more acceptable enterprise through the dehumanization of the slaves, and it also “limited the humanitarianism of the white minister.” The myth eased tensions about the immorality of slavery, as blacks became intellectually, spiritually, and culturally seen as on par with animals and thus “niggers,” as a class or group, were simply another form of chattel. According to Harris, by the 1660s, “the especially degraded status of blacks as chattel slaves was recognized by law,” and “between 1680 and 1682, the first slave codes appeared, codifying the extreme *159 deprivations of liberty already existing in social practice.”
The best that whites could do for blacks, according to this performance, was to attempt to save their souls through sermons where they were implored to be subservient and obedient to their masters. Blassingame further suggested that the movement of clergy toward support of slavery accompanied a desire to give blacks instruction on obedience and loyalty to their masters. Using biblical references, white ministers invoked images of slaves being good to their masters and relatively few “took active steps to ameliorate the conditions under which blacks lived.”
Religious leaders in the South, some who were neutral on the issue of slavery, became plantation owners' greatest allies, and perpetuated the myth from the pulpit. Others were discredited by their religious institutions, silenced, forced to migrate north, or worse--were brutalized. The development of myths about black morality, competency, and sexuality served to justify the enslavement of blacks and their denial of citizenship in the United States. Although Frederick Law Olmsted and other notable whites spoke against the inhumane treatment of the slaves and pronounced the biological equality of blacks, they were quickly dismissed and discredited. Thus, “nigger” was not simply an irrational response to blackness, but rather a calculated, strategic vehicle for the collective social and political disenfranchisement and subordination of blacks, and psychological and legal empowerment of whites. It permitted the unchecked aggressions by whites (of all socio-economic strata) against blacks, and, at least publicly, absolved them of wrongdoing toward blacks, particularly those they owned. This too was out of necessity, for if blacks were recognized as being legally on par with whites, they could demand rights, including negative rights, which might have included the right to be free from floggings, whippings, brining, rape, family separation, and slavery itself.
