Here’s a suggested contextual research practice for this year. When trying to learn more about a topic, take a deep breath, and then complete an unsubtle search that combines “slavery and” [your topic area].
Example:
Wow, lots there. Let’s try again.
Here is some of what I learned, digging through this history.
In West Virginia, in a region known as the Kanawha Saline, at a mine called the Kanawha Salt works, white overseers forced more than 2,000 enslaved Africans to gather salt for a private company.
In Gallatin County in Illinois, a state in which slavery was not even legal, enslaved Africans and African Americans were also forced to gather salt—and the mine in question was owned by the state! Meaning that slavery was illegal in Illinois for private citizens, but de facto legal if you happened to be the state, at least where the salt deposit was concerned.
Before Illinois existed as a U.S. state, it was part of land known briefly as the American Northwest Territory. In the Territory, slavery was technically illegal—the letter of the law banned it, in charter—but those already held in slavery in the Territory were not freed. The presence of state-recognized slaves in the Territory was then used to bring additional enslaved humans to the state, and to do so under the color of law, because those people had not been made slaves in the Territory, but merely brought into it after being put into slavery elsewhere. In short, the problematic conduct from a legal perspective has now been narrowed to the moment of designating someone a slave; everything that happens after someone has been made a slave is permissible.
What we see here, friends, is a set of pretty irrational legal contortions being used to justify slavery, and this is happening in the service of a very specific end: corporate (or quasi-corporate) profit margins.
Put another way, all of the legal and social structure supporting salt mining as an American industry comes down to market framing. In fact, it comes down to a particular, peculiar view of markets, one that insists on highest profit and lowest production costs, considered in isolation and in the immediate term.
Why is this peculiar?
What, Jordinn, is weird about this? Isn’t that the way business works?
Here’s the rub: business only works this way if we say it does. Business doesn’t exist by itself. It’s a thing that people invent.
The view that the corporation itself exists absolutely, and that it must prosper, and that people must hew to its well-being and not the other way around is odd because the American experiment is framed, in our stories, as a project of world-building. In the U.S. history origin story, we are building America. We’re creating a society, anew. And if conquest of land and people are the means and the cost of that creation, a certain amnesia around the steepness of that price is justified by the expansive liberty that is theoretically gained.
The American endeavor, was, at least in narrative, always for us. We brought forth upon this continent a new nation . . . to build a world for we, the people. (Did we, though?)
And if we are world-building in the name of freedom, why would we devalue the collective and uphold the profit potential of the landholder?
Why, from the earliest days of the American experiment, would we structure corporate interests this way?
Let’s consider some other history, a tale of what comes just a bit later.
In the years after the American Civil War, the country entered a period known as Reconstruction. The work of reconstruction required that those whose view of profitability and property rights had led them into armed rebellion against the federal government be brought to account and punished. It required that the physical damage to cities, towns, and infrastructure be repaired.
And it required that our social contract be rebuilt, created, this time, in a way that truly meant that “all men are created equal.”
But this does not happen. Reconstruction becomes reanimation of what we might have allowed to die, and our current era history books and survey classes tend to note only, “Reconstruction was a failure” and move on.
Unless you do some digging on your own, you probably will not hear the story of how, given a few different leadership choices, a different truth might have succeeded.
You will not hear how close we were, for a moment, to a different kind of “we.”
And you certainly will not hear who allowed it to fail, who hedged their bets.
One of the fundamental edicts of the Substack platform that I am using to connect with you appears to be ‘Thou shalt not footnote, nor endnote, nor caption, nor cite sources nor provide references in any form, for we believe that to be boring, and the people wilt not read.’ So I am wrestling with that, combined with my own wish for you to have enough to begin your own explorations into our shared stories, and not enough not to.
What I will say for now is that while White Fragility has been topping the bestseller lists this summer (and certainly, that is important), it’s Carol Anderson’s White Rage that lays out the ‘why.’ It hands our history to us. It, in particular, makes clear the political horse trading and lack of will that undercut Reconstruction from the inside out. White Rage is a hard read- our heroes will fall, far and hard. But no story is more important for our shared understanding right now, and I can assure you of this: you will not be bored. Read.
And consider, among other things, the market structures and their underlying belief systems that encourage even liberal land-and-officeholders to allow Reconstruction to fail.
Consider who was on the take, and what was being taken, and what grows up in the wake of that theft. Jim Crow, to be sure, but not only that.
Reconstruction’s failure paves the way for the dawning of the first American Gilded Age, an era hitherto unprecedented on this continent of spectacular wealth concentrated among and controlled by a handful of families. Families who then parlay that wealth, and the influence behind it, into things like the development of railroads.
James Baldwin wrote, “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
I note that many of us are quoting Baldwin all over the place this summer, and I posit that it could be world-shifting for that to be happening in partnership with a deeper reading of his texts. (In that spirit, you’re invited to post in the comments if there’s a Baldwin book you are engaging with as pages rather than paragraphs, and THEN I’d love to hear a quote from it that is feeling urgent in your life.)
American progressives are reading Baldwin this summer, and amid some real existential wrestling.
We are trying to discern just what it is that we came here to do here, together, in this America unrealized.
And we are discovering that there are not clear answers.
And that there isn’t a clear ‘We.’
And that this isn’t a voluntary project, and that its work does not happen in isolation, and that it will not be finished in our lifetimes.
And yet this is very much our work, and it’s urgent, and what I intend here in this digital space is a community-located, historically-rooted fragment of the larger effort.
We are, I promise, going back to the salt mines, and then we are going beyond them.
Before that, however, let me make some goals and methodologies clear for our journey:
First, “The things you do not see”- they matter.
Noticing is political.
Second, this concerns you. All of it. And democracy—the real deal, y’all, which we are currently called to live our way into, ready or not—requires that we hold and practice some real skills.
Unitarian Universalism is in fact not an easy faith, and democracy is not a spectator sport, and the republic is not so resilient as we would like to imagine.
And so, let us engage in the shared practices of each of those things, and let us begin with our history—with this history, and these words, or with the history under your feet or in your community. The work is simply this:
1. Wonder. Notice. Where does the matrix not quite line up? Point it out. Have a conversation with someone who knows. Ask a question.
2. Wander. Get out into your community. “Make the familiar strange,” as one of my mentors Mark Hicks advises. To which I add the assurance, which hopefully you are beginning to notice yourselves, that this actually requires very little effort. If we are paying attention at all, the familiar already is strange. Notice it.
3. Reverse those as needed.
4. Record what you know—tell us here, tell your congregation if you have one, tell your family or your neighbor. What small thing did you learn today about the tangible world in which you live?
More soon. Be safe and be curious,
j
So a belated comment. Colonial capitalism spawned the evil of chattel slavery. I'm sure I encountered this idea earlier, but it was particularly made plain in a book I happened upon on a discount table a while back, Gerald Horne's "The Counter-Revolution of 1776". He argues that Britain was moving away from slavery and the so-called American Revolution was fought so that the colonies could preserve the institution. And they wanted to preserve it because they could not resist its profits. He describes how time after time some colonists would become fearful of a potential slave rebellion, the authorities would attempt to craft a plan to make "adjustments" - rules about how many slaves per overseers, suggestions to use indentured workers from Ireland and Scotland... but whatever the plan, it would always fail because the slave-owners simply could not resist the profits. So as you titled a later post, it really is all about the benjamins. This is what we were never taught about capitalism, which seems to be embedded in US culture as part of our national religion (right up there with individualism, I suppose). We're told by the laissez-faire folk that capitalism can do no wrong, but the thing is, it was causing evil here from the very beginning.