Fundamental questions about human nature are thrust upon us when we remember slavery. How could a slave owner psychologically afford to inflict such extreme violence and pain, and so wilfully disregard another person’s humanity? How was the physical, legal, and economic violence and subjugation of slavery normalized and accepted by multiple societies? The possible answers to these questions are diverging.

One commonly held view is that humanity was at a less “enlightened” historical stage and simply did not realize that slavery was wrong. According to this line of thought, it was inevitable that humanity would see the light and progress from the dark age in which racism and commodification decided and limited people’s humanity. This view of humanity is flawed and somewhat arrogant – it projects the present conception of progress onto the past without regard for historical context.

The reality is that, in practice, slavery was not incompatible with modern ideals of freedom – after all, the world was steeped in enlightenment ideas of liberty and equality at the apex of the slave trade. Even as those ideals violently asserted themselves in the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century, slavery remained in place. This is because the root of slavery is to be found not in a moral misunderstanding, but rather in the exploitative human tendencies whose presence is a historical constant – despite the “backwardness” narrative’s best efforts to consign them to the past, as if they no longer exist. It is also worth noting that large-scale resistance efforts, such as the successful 1791 revolution led by enslaved Haitians, played a much more important role in ending transatlantic slavery than any kind of “moral progress.”

An alternative and more convincing view is that this 400-year period characterized by the theft and enslavement of 12 million people was, in fact, a display of a constitutive aspect of humanity. The view that humanity is by nature predisposed to raw violence and prone to distrust and hatred of the Other disgusts us. It tells us nothing that we want to hear about ourselves, and offers no flattering redemption narrative.

I do think, though, that this is a more honest view. Columbia University professor Saidiya Hartman explains that, when seeking to understand humanity through a study of slavery, we must “consider the forms of life that exceed and challenge our understanding of the human, because they transgress and defy our basic predicates of decency, rationality, belonging, care and community.” Seen in this light, perhaps the most frighteningly “inhuman” parts of our nature are more human than we’d like to think.

At times, history offers no obvious contemporary lessons, and instead asks simply to be understood on its own terms.

Aside from these vexing questions of human nature, the story of transatlantic slavery highlights the central role of both physical and psychological power, as well as resistance to it, in human relations. Different levels of power operated here, such as the physical power of slaveholders or the more subtle, enduring, and silent power of the legal system that helped entrench slavery.

Enslaved people constantly navigated these power relations through acts of resistance and subterfuge. In her autobiographical novel Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, escaped American slave Harriet Jacobs recounts how she staved off sexual predation at the hands of her master by expertly navigating his desires and, by having an affair with another white man, using her own sexuality to protect herself from her master. Olaudah Equiano traded small trinkets and goods until he had enough money to buy his freedom, while Nat Turner turned the U.S. upside down in 1831 by leading a large-scale slave rebellion in Virginia. In countless more acts of daily resistance and survival of which we have no account, enslaved people confronted the power that was exerted over them.

For all that the history of slavery is, there are many things it is not. For one, it is not an oracle of revealed truth. At times, history offers no obvious contemporary lessons, and instead asks simply to be understood on its own terms. This can frustrate our desire to instrumentalize the past, but this is the reality of coming to terms with it. Secondly, history is not an uninterrupted story of endless suffering. It is a human story, one fraught with inspiration as well as pain, resolve as well as horror. Finally, history is also not a parable, nor a moral arc that bends inevitably toward freedom or justice. Slavery is still present in many parts of the world, and the racist relics of transatlantic slavery have taken shape in the form of mass incarceration of people of colour, racially targeted police violence, and social and political marginality and poverty in racialized communities.

This column has attempted to present the living history of slavery and its residual aftershocks. It has sought to remember the lives of enslaved people and bring light to the dark corners of the human experience. The shadows of slavery linger on. Instead of running from them, we must turn toward them with deep humility in an effort to better understand not only parts of ourselves, but this chaotic world around us.

Shadows of Slavery is a column that seeks to remember the history of slavery in the Americas and to examine how this history manifests itself today. Nadir Khan can be reached at shadowsofslavery@mcgilldaily.com.

The post The lessons of slavery appeared first on The McGill Daily.

***

“After the alarm caused by Nat Turner’s insurrection had subsided, the slaveholders came to the conclusion that it would be well to give the slaves enough of religious instruction to keep them from murdering their masters. The Episcopal clergyman offered to hold a separate service on Sundays for their benefit. […] Pious Mr. Pike brushed up his hair till it stood upright, and, in deep, solemn tones, began: ‘Hearken, ye servants! Give strict heed unto my words. You are rebellious sinners. Your hearts are filled with all manner of evil. ‘Tis the devil who tempts you. God is angry with you, and will surely punish you, if you don’t forsake your wicked ways […] God sees you. You tell lies. God hears you. […] Your masters may not find you out, but God sees you, and will punish you. O, the depravity of your hearts!”

—Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

***

“The fact that the church of our country (with fractional exceptions) does not esteem ‘the Fugitive Slave Law’ as a declaration of war against religious liberty, implies that that church regards religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love, and good will towards man. It esteems sacrifice above mercy; psalm-singing above right doing; solemn meetings above practical righteousness. […] But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines, who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. […] For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done!”

—Frederick Douglass, The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro

***

“Whilst I thus struggled, there seemed a light from heaven to fall upon me, which banished all my desponding fears, and I was enabled to form a new resolution to go on to prison and to death, if it might be my portion: and the Lord showed me that it was His will I should be resigned to die any death that might be my lot, in carrying his message, and be entirely crucified to the world, and sacrifice all to His glory that was then in my possession, which His witnesses, the holy Apostles, had done before me. It was then revealed to me that the Lord had given me the evidence of a clean heart, in which I could rejoice day and night, and I walked and talked with God, and my soul was illuminated with heavenly light, and I knew nothing but Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”

—Memoir of Old Elizabeth, a Coloured Woman

***

“‘Did any of the black people on his place believe in the teachings of their master?’
No, my child; none of us listened to him about singing and praying. I tell you we used to have some good times together praying and singing. He did not want us to pray, but we would have our little prayer-meeting anyhow. Sometimes when we met to hold our meetings we would put a big wash-tub full of water in the middle of the floor to catch the sound of our voices when we sung. When we all sung we would march around and shake each other’s hands, and we would sing easy and low, so marster could not hear us. O, how happy I used to be in those meetings, although I was a slave! I thank the Lord Aunt Jane Lee lived by me. She helped me to make my peace with the Lord. O, the day I was converted! It seemed to me it was a paradise here below! It looked like I wanted nothing any more. Jesus was so sweet to my soul! Aunt Jane used to sing, ‘Jesus! the name that charms our fears.’ That hymn just suited my case. Sometimes I felt like preaching myself. It seemed I wanted to ask every body if they loved Jesus when I first got converted.”

—Octavia V. Rogers Albert, The House of Bondage

***

“When the glad tidings came that we were freed, and the war was over, such rejoicing and weeping and shouting among the slaves was never heard before, unless it was the time that the Ark of the Covenant was brought back to the children of Israel. Great numbers of the slaves left their masters immediately. They had no shelter, but they dug holes in the ground, made dug-outs, brush houses, with a piece of board here and there, whenever they could find one, until finally they had a little village called ‘Dink-town,’ looking more like an Indian village than anything else. There they sang and prayed and rejoiced. Later on, the soldiers began to come through, returning from the war. They brought many negroes with them who were searching for members of their families. I remember my mother, with me holding on to her skirts, standing watching the soldiers as they passed in their blue suits, and the colored people all shouting ‘Hurrah for Marse Abe,’ and cheering the Union boys as they passed. That was a glad day. That certainly was a year of jubilee for the poor black slave. They had heard about the Liberation from Bondage of the Children of Israel from the Egyptians and their prayers were always to the Almighty God, and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that they too some day might be delivered, and now it had actually come. Oh! What joy!”

—Emma J. Smith, Twice Sold, Twice Ransomed

***

God and religion were crucial to the experiences of enslaved people in the Atlantic World, whether as targets for anti-abolitionist discourse or as a genuine means to make sense of an unbearable reality. Yet unlike the unbridled political, economic, and legal forces defending slavery, religious rhetoric assumed a more personal voice, authoritatively appealing to people’s deep-seated beliefs and fears of the world. All the while, enslaved people found their own way of negotiating faith to serve their own needs, resisting the very ideas and practices that daily sought to subjugate them. Indeed, the distance between the pulpit and the plantation was never great.

Shadows of Slavery is a column that seeks to remember the history of slavery in the Americas and to examine how this history manifests itself today. Nadir Khan can be reached at shadowsofslavery@mcgilldaily.com.

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Remembering the history

Chantelle, who grew up in Jamaica and studied in the U.S. and France before coming to McGill, spoke about the varying levels of awareness about the history of slavery that she has encountered. “In high school, growing up in Jamaica, we did Caribbean history more than world history, and a lot of that was talking about slavery – it wasn’t a hidden part of curriculum. In terms of my identity, I was a lot more aware of what a past slave society would look like when I came to the U.S.. [Here] I interact with people who are just not as aware, and hear people in Canada say ‘I didn’t hear about Canadian slavery, I didn’t know about it,’”

She said that her visit to former slave depots in West Africa – namely, Cape Coast Castle in Ghana and the Maison des Esclaves in Senegal – as well as to a slave museum in the major slave port town of Nantes, France, highlighted the vast scope of the impact of slavery. “There’s no way that you can escape it, it’s part of everyone’s history. Even if you weren’t dealing in slaves, its effects crossed the world – it was a triangular trade connecting Europe, America, and Africa. […] But even then, I didn’t think that the awareness in [Jamaica] was that great.”

Anne-Sophie is Cameroonian; though born in France, her childhood was split between time in Niger and Uganda, and she eventually came to Canada to pursue her studies. Anne-Sophie spoke about a personal connection to the history of slavery. “I feel very touched and linked to this period of time. I was not directly impacted, of course, I did not suffer from slavery, but I just feel like the remnants of this historical period are still visible today. When I think of the history of slavery, I think about my history, my family history, my grandfather’s history. My ancestors were impacted in some way or another. I think about reconnecting with my past and learning about how low humanity can stoop.”

I asked both students how they thought slavery could best be acknowledged and remembered. “Black History Month shouldn’t just be a month,” said Anne-Sophie. “It’s all our histories, and they should be learned throughout the year. Why is only a month used to remember the past? It’s world history, it can’t be condensed.” Anne-Sophie, who currently lives in France, added that French society must confront Black history more than it currently does. “During high school in France, my cultural heritage was so condemned. They would say, ‘Racism? What are you talking about? This doesn’t happen here.’ I feel like [in France] there is a shame about Black history, they like to cover it up. The moment you talk about racism, a French person is literally scared shitless.”

Anne-Sophie expressed that discussing slavery and race today continues to be difficult. “I feel that the African community in France is muffled,” explained Anne-Sophie. “The French pride themselves on being united, but we’re not united. Snarky comments and micro-aggressions – my goodness – happen on a daily basis.”

The situation is different in Jamaica. “We don’t have a minority status, as people in positions of power are Black,” said Chantelle. “What we have in Jamaica is more colourism or classism. Even within the Black community it’s like, ‘Okay, you’re lighter-skinned, so you’re more likely to be successful, more likely to be considered beautiful, more likely to be considered intelligent.’”

For Chantelle, remembering slavery begins in schools. “Commemorating is good, and having spaces to learn more outside of the classroom [is good], but if you don’t learn about it at an early age, then you won’t have an interest in exploring it later on in life. It’s a general consciousness, it’s hard to awaken people when they don’t want to think that discrimination still exists.”

Justice after slavery

Anne-Sophie and Chantelle differed somewhat on the topic of redress for slavery and payment of reparations. “I sometimes think, would [reparations] really change anything?” said Anne-Sophie. “It seems a way to cover something up that I don’t think can ever be mended. Still, I think it can be helpful.” For Anne-Sophie, acknowledgement is ultimately more important than reparations. “It’s about accepting that you have a privilege, on this earth, that we will not have for a long time. I’m not sure, but I think reparations should only be given to the older generation who was impacted, or to the [descendants] of slaves who were obliged to live in squalor – because that is still the case in ghettos.”

Speaking to the history of Jamaica, Chantelle explained that she supports reparations, as the harms of slavery were never recognized nor redressed. “In Jamaica, even after emancipation, people were working as slaves because they didn’t have the freedom to move off plantations for the most part. It was when slavery became unprofitable that the abolitionists got their way. It was a profit thing, not because slavery was morally wrong. It was all a balance of economics.”

Chantelle highlighted the hypocrisy of the British reaction to the call for reparations. “They were only willing to let go when it wasn’t profitable, and they paid off the people who were responsible for allowing that [by compensating former slaveholders]. Then, David Cameron, the prime minister of the UK, comes to Jamaica and shakes hands with people and says, ‘Oh, you know, reparations aren’t really necessary.’ No, we think you owe us.”

Chantelle also spoke about her experience studying legal traditions – such as French civil law, English common law, or Roman and American law – that have historically served to entrench and legitimize systems of slavery. “As the critical race theory scholar Mari Matsuda has said, you have to approach it in two ways: outside the courtroom, or outside law school, and inside. There is speaking about these issues in a public forum, on the street, et cetera. But minority populations or poor populations don’t have access to justice because it’s not affordable and then you’re being discriminated against,” Chantelle said. “Then there is inside the courtroom, or inside law school. If law is going to be used as an instrument of power against me, then I should know how to use it as well. That’s me taking back the power that was taken away from me.”

For Chantelle, the study of law serves to empower her community. “There’s no way I’m not going to give back to the community that I’m from. That’s important. If you come to these positions you can’t be like the nice house slave and forget your brothers in the field. Using law school as a stepping stone, on the back of those who came before you and had to make sacrifices for you to be here – I take that very seriously. I take my country’s history and my family’s history very seriously. Being Black, being Jamaican, and an international student, I think it’s true: I have to work twice as hard to be half as good as white students – and so I’m here, working hard.”

Shadows of Slavery is a column that seeks to remember the history of slavery in the Americas and to examine how this history manifests itself today. Nadir Khan can be reached at shadowsofslavery@mcgilldaily.com.

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326 years before the murder of Scott, the South Carolina slave code of 1690 gave birth to the slave patrol. Grounded in what legal historian Sally Hadden refers to as “an unequivocal manifestation of white fear” that enslaved people would revolt at any moment, the slave patrol was one of the first formal state institutions in slave societies around the Atlantic. Patrols roamed country roads and plantations by night, looking for potential fugitive slaves and searching the living quarters of enslaved people for contraband goods like liquor or books.

Crucial to the slave patrol enterprise was the pass system. Patrollers, or “paddyrollers” as termed by enslaved people, had the power to stop and question a slave for any reason, especially if the latter was travelling without a white person accompanying them. A pass document signed by a master or overseer typically indicated the enslaved person’s business and provided safe passage. Though the pass system was at times subverted by literate slaves who could forge their own passes, it ultimately represented complete control over the bodies and mobility of the vast majority of enslaved people.

Although the physical policing of enslaved bodies was integral to upholding slavery, the deep psychological effect of slave patrols played an additional role. Slave patrols travelled on horseback, and were thus physically placed above eye level. They represented an omnipresent force with sweeping authority conferred by law, which allowed for extensive searches of the person and personal spaces. The darkness of the night took on new meaning as the potential threat of danger was always present anywhere beyond the plantation. In this way, the power of slave patrols exerted itself even in spaces where they were not present.

“Policing in [the U.S.] has always had the dual purpose of maintaining social order and enforcing the racial hierarchy.”

Journalist Salim Muwakkil writes that “policing in [the U.S.] has always had the dual purpose of maintaining social order and enforcing the racial hierarchy.” Muwakkil’s analysis of policing can also be extended to other contexts. For instance, a pass system in Western Canada, put into place in 1885 and lasting for sixty years, confined Indigenous people to reserves, with the goal of stifling access to urban areas and communication with other Indigenous communities. Indigenous people were required to have a pass indicating the reason and duration of the person’s absence approved by the colonial Indian agent on the reserve.

Decades later, racist discriminatory policing is alive and well in major Canadian cities. The practice of carding is a hallmark of Toronto police, whereby individuals, primarily of colour, are stopped and questioned on the street, without charge, and asked for identification that is then entered into a database. The racist policing of the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) is also well documented. An internal SPVM report compiled by criminologist Mathieu Charest in the wake of the 2008 police murder of teenager Freddy Villanueva in Montreal North, outlined the extent to which racism was entrenched within the Montreal police. Among incidents cited in the report are officers telling people of colour to “go back to your country,” or even that “we prefer to be colonizers than slaves.”

In the U.S., police brutality is rampant. The recent deaths of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, and so many others are only a fraction of a long line of police murders in the country’s past.

Slave patrols not only perpetuated white supremacy, but functioned more specifically to protect the economic interests of the propertied elite, which was then the slaveholding class. Police today continue to brutally carry out the latter role in addition to the former. In Montreal, police consistently use excessive force against explicitly anti-capitalist demonstrators who threaten the current economic system, for instance during protests against tuition hikes or austerity policies, as well as during the city’s yearly marches against police brutality.

What are we to do with this understanding of law enforcement’s past? History does not prescribe a course of action to take, but what is clear is that when state entities are granted vast authority to profile, surveil, and inflict violence upon certain groups of people, a dangerous structural power imbalance is created. It is an imbalance that is difficult to overcome despite the most thorough forms of oversight and accountability. All this is aggravated by the fact that police forces in both Canada and the United States are becoming increasingly militarized with sophisticated weaponry and equipment despite dropping crime rates. As we move forward, an awareness of the police’s past can help us move toward a better understanding of what their future role should be instead.

Shadows of Slavery is a column that seeks to remember the history of slavery in the Americas and to examine how this history manifests itself today. Nadir Khan can be reached at shadowsofslavery@mcgilldaily.com.

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Pakistan and India are no strangers to bonded labour: various sectors of their economies, such as agriculture, carpet-weaving, mining, tanning, handicraft and glass bangle production, as well as domestic work, are predicated upon it. The Global Slavery Index estimates 14 million enslaved people in India and 2.1 million in Pakistan; along with China, they are the three countries in the world with the highest number of people enslaved.

In Pakistan, specifically in the Punjab and Sindh provinces, over half of the country’s bonded labourers currently find themselves labouring in brick kilns. As journalist Haroon Janjua has highlighted, many are held against a debt and end up living permanently on the kiln. Anti-Slavery International defines bonded labour as a situation where a person’s labour is demanded in the repayment of a loan. Such a person is trapped into a situation where they earn very little or no pay, resulting in an indefinite time of forced labour and often in the passing on of debt to the next generation. Many are children, often sold or loaned by families facing extreme poverty.

Bonded labourers at brick kilns can spend up to 14 hours per day working with dangerous machinery and transporting heavy bricks, surrounded by toxic smoke and the intense heat of the endless burning of coal used to fuel the kilns. Labourers are commonly subjected to violence, sexual harassment, and torture by overseers. Overall, the scenes at brick kilns in India and Pakistan placed side by side with, say, a 19th century Caribbean rice or sugar plantation yield a striking resemblance as similar working conditions and power dynamics play out. Kiln owners essentially control the lives of labourers through violence, rendering escape difficult, if not impossible.

Bonded labourers at brick kilns can spend up to 14 hours per day working with dangerous machinery and transporting heavy bricks, surrounded by toxic smoke and intense heat.

The large presence of children in slavery in South Asia is not a new phenomenon. Historian Richard B. Allen estimates that in the 18th and 19th centuries, 20 to 35 per cent of enslaved people on ships sailing from ports around the Indian Ocean, such as those in Madagascar, Southeast Asia, and East Africa, were children. Moreover, in Children in Slavery Through the Ages, historian Fred Morton explains that a third of children in the 19th century East African slave trade were sold by families in debt, mainly with the death or the absence of parents necessitating the sale.

In plantation-era slavery, however, children did not play the same role as they do in kiln sets in modern South Asia. Throughout circum-Atlantic slavery, children were always widely sought by the planter elite, mainly due to the low life expectancy of enslaved adults and the ease with which children could be controlled. Despite this, they were not as heavily relied on for labour as they are in modern South Asian brick kilns. Today, a quarter of all kiln workers in Pakistan are children, while in India, four-year-olds have been found smashing coal for the kiln fires.

Moreover, unlike in traditional institutions of slavery, the practice of bonded labour, though prevalent, is not currently sanctioned by law. In fact, both India and Pakistan abolished bonded labour through legislative statutes in 1976 and 1992 respectively, and the constitutions of both countries explicitly prohibit forced labour; article 11 of the constitution of Pakistan further asserts that “slavery is non-existent.” In contrast, under chattel slavery regimes such as Ancient Rome or the U.S., the law designated slaves as personal movable property and viewed enslaved women as continual producers of enslaved children through the Roman legal principle of partus sequitur ventrem (“the offspring follows the womb”). Slave status followed the mother and thus defined the child before the child even existed.

As scholar A.B. Maity explains, forced labour in India is a relic of colonialism and feudalism, rooted in the power wielded by landlords over peasants under conditions of land scarcity and only worsened by colonial relations. The system of bonded labour has endured, expanding to other areas, and is sustained today in part by a neoliberal economic policy, introduced in India in 1991 under pressure from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. By funneling benefits from economic development to a narrow class, neoliberalism has perpetuated poverty while heavily relying on cheap labour. The brick kiln industry in particular has grown in importance due to ongoing rapid urbanization.

Though existing under different social and legal conditions, the institution of slavery remains alive today. Far from being confined to the past, slavery continues to be a reality for millions around the world.

Shadows of Slavery is a column that seeks to remember the history of slavery in the Americas and to examine how this history manifests itself today. Nadir Khan can be reached at shadowsofslavery@mcgilldaily.com.

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It was in the midst of the American slave economy’s 18th century shift from a central cash crop of tobacco to cotton that Whitney invented the cotton gin. This device rapidly separated the seeds from picked cotton, decreasing processing time by a factor of fifty and accelerating the highly labour intensive and slow process of planting, cultivating, and picking cotton. Faster processing meant more cotton could be shipped, and with foreign demand rising, use of the cotton gin became widespread among planters. Cotton productionthereby increased exponentially, as did the demand for slave labour in the Lower Mississippi Valley. The impact was immense – the number of enslaved people would swell from 700,000 in 1790 to 4,000,000 by the dawn of the American Civil War in 1860. As slavery became even more firmly entrenched in the American South, the economic and political powerhouse of the “Cotton Kingdom” took root.

With Enlightenment ideas travelling across the world, Whitney was not alone in plucking what could be assumed to be the harmless fruits of human ingenuity. By 1811, engineer Robert Fulton had designed and launched the New Orleans steamboat – a vessel never before seen on the waters of the Mississippi. For the first time, steam-powered boats could go up, instead of just down, the crucial Mississippi river, which fed into New Orleans, a focal point of the transatlantic slave trade. Steamboats literally raced up and down the waterway, as historian Walter Johnson recounts in River of Dark Dreams, frantically transporting cotton from the Mississippi Valley to the bustling market in New Orleans. Upriver, the lands that were previously thought to be too far from the market suddenly became viable places to have plantations, as steamboats could now deliver agricultural goods.

The history of technology and slavery helps debunk the myth that innovation can be disconnected from violence exacted upon oppressed people.

The American Empire was ascending as the unprecedented cotton boom rattled across the world by the 1830s, but different minds continued to devise ways that would make the Cotton Kingdom more efficient. After careful experimentation, a hybrid genetic strain of cotton named Petit Gulf was created. This strain of cotton hardened the already gruelling work regime of enslaved people. According to Johnson, not only did Petit Gulf resist cotton rot and produce finer fibres, it also grew in a variety of climates and soils, bloomed earlier, which lengthened the picking season, and was easier to pick quickly, thereby almost quadrupling the daily workload of enslaved adults.

Today, we tend to think of technological innovation as a universal social good – rapid technological change is often touted as a great benefit of capitalism. The history of technology and slavery helps debunk the myth that innovation can be disentangled and disconnected from violence exacted upon oppressed people.

Recent technological development in the areas of transportation and communication have made it possible to globalize production, displacing labourers and driving down wages.

Take, for example, Apple and Samsung’s ever-evolving consumer electronics, the unparalleled convenience of which is in such high demand that production can scarcely keep up. At the Foxconn factories in China that manufacture the companies’ products, people work 12 hours per day for weeks without rest, and do hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime. Exploitation of children is also rampant. These abhorrent working conditions have led to a wave of suicides in recent years, with workers jumping from the windows of the factories at the Foxconn City Industrial Park.

The trope of the pioneering captain of industry fearlessly driving society forward deeply pervades the modern consciousness. But between glorifying the likes of E. I. du Pont, Steve Jobs, and Henry Ford, something important gets lost: the potentially brutal legacy and human impact of technological ideas like those exemplified by Whitney, Fulton, and others. We should remember, then, that for all that technology brings to the world, it comes at an unjustifiable cost to those most deeply oppressed by the capitalist system of production.

Shadows of Slavery is a column that seeks to remember the history of slavery in the Americas and to examine how this history manifests itself today. Nadir Khan can be reached at shadowsofslavery@mcgilldaily.com.

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It was eight months after being kidnapped by slave catchers, in what is now Nigeria, before the young Olaudah Equiano caught sight of the towering slave ship that would transport him across the Atlantic Ocean. According to his 1789 autobiography, he was “greatly astonished,” and was quickly convinced that he “was in a world of bad spirits.”

He was somewhat right in his assessment. An Atlantic slave ship was certainly a site of human suffering and depravity, but it was equally a place of defiant resistance – the type that forces us to pause when reflecting on resistance in the world today.

The scene below the decks of a slave ship was a grisly one. Captured people lay shackled and packed tightly side by side in small compartments. Equiano, whose autobiography was the first published account of the Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas and was widely read across Europe, described the conditions on the ship that carried him.

“The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome […] now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place and the heat of the climate […] almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspiration, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness amongst the slaves, of which many died.”

“This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains […] and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole scene of horror almost inconceivable.”

All this was the backdrop to the disorientation and grief amongst the captured. Siblings, parents, children, and friends had been left behind. The familiarity of community quickly became a faded memory as strange white men yelled and gestured unintelligibly while brandishing all manner of weaponry. What world had they entered?

It was from this nightmare that the ethic of slave resistance precariously emerged. As American historian Marcus Rediker desribes in his book The Slave Ship: A Human History, finding a means of communication was key. Enslaved people quickly created pidgins – temporary, makeshift languages – to bridge the linguistic divides amongst the diverse array of West African languages on board. These pidgins gave birth to new ties of kinship, and laid the foundations for coordinated resistance.

The hunger strike was one tactic employed consistently throughout the transatlantic slave trade. Already intensely malnourished, enslaved people spat out food, at times refusing to eat for days at a time. The hunger strike was an act that directly challenged a captain’s authority by re-asserting enslaved people’s own agency and snatching back their humanity. The slave ship captain was suddenly faced with a stark choice: to change the treatment of those onboard, or suffer a loss of ‘capital.’

Others, however, engaged in the most dangerous and risky act of all – violent insurrection, which involved numerous hazardous steps: surreptitious late-night planning, escaping from shackles, somehow using knives (or nothing at all) to battle sailors armed with muskets, all in the hopes of reaching the weapons locker (deliberately located on the far end of the vessel) and taking control of the ship.

These modes of struggle are even more astounding given that the slave trade was designed in every way to prevent resistance of any kind. A physical barrier divided the centre of the ship and a cannon constantly faced slave quarters. Fetters, clasps, neck rings, chains, spikes, and other purposely built technological objects were routinely used to constrain and torture enslaved people. Yet, they consistently resisted in the face of this hell, and often in violent ways.

Today, the prevailing paradigm sees violent resistance as unseemly – too confrontational and direct for even the most liberal sensitivities. While few would condemn enslaved people for their resistance, modern liberal rhetoric demands that oppressed people protest in ‘the right way,’ engage in ‘constructive dialogue,’ and generally follow the tricky doctrine of nonviolence, even in the face of violent oppression.

This optic encourages, for example, one to admonish Ferguson protesters for destroying property and Black Lives Matter activists for disruptive tactics, while in the same breath remaining silent on the social misery brought about by the militarized police and the carceral state, or the legacy of segregation in the Jim Crow South and a hundred years of Klan lynchings. It is language that both binds and forgets, that dictates and condescends.

Although the paradigm of respectability and non-violence may seem reasonable at first glance, in reality, it simply draws a line around permissible forms of resistance in order to fit the needs of those who oppress, and ease the insecurities of those who sit idly by as blatant injustice unfolds. They tell oppressed people to wait for their oppressors to benevolently recognize their humanity. In this way, to demand that resistance be acceptable to the liberal framework is to demand that people set aside their intrinsic agency and inherent right to self-determination.

The history of slavery reveals that resistance is an organic and bottum-up process that does not wait for recognition. It is spurred on by those who are most acutely aware of the particular web of injustice that they are entangled in, and who thus know the best way out. To try and dictate how people resist, then, is to misunderstand the nature of the act itself.

Shadows of Slavery is a column that seeks to remember the history of slavery in the Atlantic World and to examine how this history manifests itself today. Nadir Khan can be reached at shadowsofslavery@mcgilldaily.com.

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Human beings were enslaved in Canada. I just have to say it bluntly, because most Canadians either forget, ignore, or simply do not know that this took place. Canadians get lost in seductive legends like the Underground Railroad and the ‘rescuing’ of Black loyalists from the American Revolution, and all the enticing and comforting rhetorical power that comes with them. We need to come to terms with the reality of what Canada is – a country whose national consciousness has managed to erase the fact that over some 200 years, the lives and labour of thousands of Indigenous and Black people were stolen by white settlers.

This national erasure means many things. For one, it means that we forget the real experiences of enslavement as well as the practical realities of how slavery operated in Canada. However, it also means that we must pull back the curtain on our tendency to weave artificial myths about who we are as a nation.

One such myth is that slavery in Canada was “kinder and gentler” than in other parts of the world. To debunk this, it is useful to recall the story of Marie-Joseph Angélique, an enslaved woman in Montreal.

With a burning city at her back and flames lighting up the night sky, Angélique ran down cobblestone streets for her life and freedom on an April night in 1734 – though, like many fugitive slaves, she was quickly caught. Accused of starting a fire in her mistress’s home that spread to 45 other houses, she was promptly jailed and repeatedly tortured until she ultimately confessed to the act under duress. A court judgement sealed her fate:

“She shall make amends naked in her shirt, with a rope about her neck, holding a burning torch in front of the main entrance to the parish church of the city of Montreal. […] There, bareheaded and kneeling, shall declare that she maliciously set and caused the said fire for which she grievously repents and begs forgiveness from God, after which she shall have her hand cut off and raised on a post planted in front of said church, and then be conducted to the public square, to be attached to the post with an iron chain and burned alive, her body reduced to ashes and scattered to the winds.”

Though perhaps an exceptional case, this historical moment represents the very core of Canadian slavery: a process of colonial white domination, rooted in a voracious capitalist greed, seeking constantly to dehumanize and commodify the ‘other,’ while premised always on the implied threat of violence or its actual use.

This is what nearly 4,200 slaves in Canada experienced – a figure which, according to historian Marcel Trudel, almost certainly underestimates the true number of enslaved people. Mid-17th century settlers first argued for the ownership of slaves in Lower Canada for agricultural production, domestic service, and home defence, which the French monarchy recognized in 1689 by royal decree. Though a plantation economy never developed in Canada, chiefly due to climate, the lives and experiences of enslaved peoples were profoundly similar to their counterparts around the transatlantic world.

The French Code noir of 1685, the comprehensive slave law of the French Caribbean, was informally applied in Canada by shaping local practices related to punishment and legal status. After the 1689 royal decree, the first Canadian slave ordinance of 1709, an enslaved person in Canada, such as any one of the 1,525 in Montreal, was considered to be personal property. They, just like an enslaved individual from Barbados, Haiti, or the Thirteen Colonies, could be bought and sold at public auctions in Montreal and Quebec City, serve as security for debts, be loaned or rented through contracts, and inherited through wills and estates. Through the cold, ruthless and abstract fiction of the law, human beings were reduced to “movable property.” Charmaine Nelson, a scholar of the transatlantic slave trade and Mcgill professor, explained in our interview that “a slave was essentially like a table or any other moveable personal property. The law not only made it so it was actually impossible for a slaveowner to rape their slave – because one cannot rape property – but incentivized rape and sexual exploitation, given that any children born to an enslaved female were themselves slaves regardless of the race or status of the father.”

Demographically, slavery in Canada involved more Indigenous people than Black people – a full 65 per cent of all enslaved, according to Trudel – who hailed mainly from the Mississippi valley trade routes, but also from the Great Lakes, the western territories beyond Lake Superior, and the northern territories. Many were from the Pawnee nation near Kansas and Missouri, which over time inspired “Panis,” a catch-all term for enslaved Indigenous people in Canada. Canadian colonization was not simply a process of appropriating Indigenous land and violently displacing peoples, but also of exploiting Indigenous people’s bodies and their labour.

An intimately public enterprise, slavery in Canada was linked to several iconic public institutions. Here in Montreal, the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, the General Hospital, several priests and bishops, the canonized saint and founder of the Grey Nuns of Montreal Marguerite d’Youville, governors Charles and Paul-Joseph LeMoyne de Longueuil, and merchant James McGill all owned slaves.

To my knowledge, no physical commemoration of these facts exists. Instead, a nondescript government building and a public square in Old Montreal now bear the name of Place d’Youville. Longueuil is the name of a suburb on Montreal’s south shore. Charles-LeMoyne is a hospital, and McGill is a university, which, both insultingly and defiantly, insists on placing the statue of its slave-owning founder at its entrance for all to see.

Still, Canada has many other difficult histories. The internment of German and Japanese people; the Chinese head tax and the immigrants who toiled and died on the national railroad; the horror of residential schools; and the 1869 Métis Red River Rebellion are only some of the histories which directly confront, interrupt, and frustrate the adoption of commonly propagated Canadian tropes of a supposedly harmonious, multicultural, and peaceful nation. Like these moments, the history of slavery in Canada is erased and repressed from the popular consciousness.

What does this erasure mean as we approach 2017, the date upon which we are told to celebrate 150 years of Canada? I believe it means slave narratives and history must no longer be what Canadian poet George Elliott Clarke has properly called “a silently painful wound, an anthology of the unspeakable that cannot enter into our anthologies.”

The self-congratulating parades, celebrations, and public monuments will not reflect what Canada has been and where it should go, but our conversations can. To be of any use, these conversations and debates must go beyond blithe gesturing to ‘sad chapters of Canada’s past’ and must be more than an exercise in national myth-making. Perhaps by venturing instead into the uncertain terrain of uncomfortable truths can we truly wrestle with the historical injustices so foundational to this country. Perhaps it is only there, with all the unsteadiness that comes with bearing witness to the past, that we can imagine a new national project that truly respects everyone’s humanity.

Shadows of Slavery is a column that seeks to remember the history of slavery in the Americas and to examine how this history manifests itself today. Nadir Khan can be reached at shadowsofslavery@mcgilldaily.com.

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