Humans and dehumanisation

disturbing developments, reading Toni Morrison’s new book — a collection of her Harvard Norton essays — is at once difficult and poignant.

The lectures that comprise the six chapters in this slim volume were delivered before the last presidential election, and were not directly concerned with Donald Trump’s elevation to the most powerful political office in the world. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his foreword, describes the milieu in which these were delivered: Barack Obama was in the White House, the Black Lives Matter movement had prompted action against erring police officers, and Hillary Clinton was set to enter the Oval office. But now, more than a year later, as Mr Coates points out, “it is impossible to read her thoughts... without considering our current moment.” It is a moment in which many of us are, to quote T S Eliot, no longer at ease.

In the six chapters, Ms Morrison looks at history, literature, social customs and legal documents, as well as her own work, to craft a compelling argument about how “race” was created as a structure of power and continues to be used in our contemporary times to perpetuate a status quo. “Race has been a constant arbiter of difference, as have wealth, class and gender — each of which is about power and the necessity of control,” she writes. Slavery and the construction “blackness” or “otherness” is a running theme of the lectures. Ms Morrison critiques the pseudo science that was used to control the “Other”, in this case Blacks.

To demonstrate how science was used to justify the controls imposed on the Africans brought to the Americas in slave ships, Ms Morrison quotes from a mid-19th century “medical” paper, “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro

The writer, one Samuel Cartwright, a physician and slave owner, opines: “The black blood distributed to the brain chains the mind to ignorance, superstition and barbarism, and bolts the door against civilisation, moral culture and religious truth.” The attempt of the discourse is to reduce blacks to something less than human, useful and yet undeserving of full rights. As a corollary, this provided licence for their inhuman treatment.

One is reminded of the concept of the “Muselmann” that philosopher Giorgio Agamben explored in his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995). The term was not invented by Mr Agamben but had been used extensively in German concentration camps as well as memoirs of survivors, such as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. It refers to the kind of prisoner who had been reduced to a hopeless physical and mental condition through hunger. Too weak to work and without the will to live, they usually landed in the gas chambers. “Their life is short,” writes Mr Agamben, “they form the backbone of the camp... continually removed and always identical ...One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death.”

A similar dehumanisation of the blacks in America had similarly horrifying results. Ms Morrison discusses the papers of Thomas Thistlewood, a 18th century slave owner, who would routinely rape the black women he owned. Of course, at that time, slaves did not have rights that could protect them from such abuse; women had to submit to droit de seigneur or the right of the lord. What’s striking about Thistlewood, however, is the fact that he kept detailed records of his sexual exploits in notes, along with the details of running his farm etc. Ms Morrison notes how he used Latin to describe where he forced his slaves to have sex with him: “Sup. Lect. for ‘on the bed’; Sup. Terre. for ‘on the ground’... when not satisfied, Sed non bene.”

The cavalier attitude of Thistlewood — Ms Morrison asserts he was not an exception but the rule — persists in many different ways, evident in the violence routinely meted out to racial and religious minorities in the US. But this also has global reverberations, especially in India, where a right-wing majoritarian ethics is dominating the public discourse, unchecked by the government and often resulting in such incidents as the murder of a Muslim worker in Rajasthan earlier this month. In such times, this slim book is not an easy one to read — but definitely an important one.

Ms Morrison looks at history, literature, social customs and legal documents, as well as her own work, to craft a compelling argument about how “race” was created as a structure of power

Toni Morrison Harvard University Press 114 pages; ~599