Is Everything Buried?
It's so interesting to think about this.
“We’re just starting to excavate this stuff now—it’s incredible to think about it.”
Everything’s buried—it’s really interesting to think about it. I’ll give two examples—the first is US slavery and the second is the British Empire.
First Example: US Slavery
Everyone should watch this incredible interview—it’s one of the best interviews I’ve ever seen in my life—in which Douglas A. Blackmon interviewed Edward E. Baptist:
You could say without hyperbole that Baptist’s 2014 book is probably one of the most interesting and most fascinating and most important books ever published:
The Half Has Never Been Told (2014)
See the following comments about the 2014 book:
the book “is not an easy book to read, but it is a book that needs to be read”
the book “weaves deftly between analysis of economic data and narrative prose to paint a picture of American slavery that is pretty different from what you may have learned in high school Social Studies class”
Noam Chomsky made—in a 2015 interview—the following points about US slavery:
“Racism is a very serious problem in the United States.”
“our economy, our wealth, our privilege relies very heavily on a century of horrifying slave labor camps”
“cotton production was not just the fuel of the Industrial Revolution”
cotton “was the basis for the financial system, the merchant system, commerce, England, as well”
“These were bitter, brutal slave labor camps.”
Baptist’s 2014 book has a “startling” title
it’s “more or less true” that the half “was never told”
Baptist shows “pretty convincingly” in his 2014 book that the “slave labor camps” saw productivity increase “more rapidly than in industry” with “no technological advance, just the bullwhip”
“Just by driving people harder and harder to the point of survival, they were able to increase productivity and profit.”
Baptist “points out that the word ‘torture’ is not used in discussion of this period”—he “introduces it should be used”
“these are camps that could have impressed the Nazis”
“it is a large part of the basis for our wealth and privilege”
“Is there a slave museum in the United States?”
“this is the core of our history, along with the extermination or expulsion of the native population, but it’s not part of our consciousness”
It’s interesting to think about the fact that Baptist’s 2014 book came out only 8 years ago. And you can imagine how long it will take for high schools to actually begin to teach about these four things:
(1) the extent to which these slave labor camps used systematic torture
(2) the extent to which this systematic torture drove productivity
(3) the extent to which this productivity is the basis of our wealth and privilege
(4) the extent to which US slavery involved various other horrors—in addition to the systematic torture—that people don’t know about
My understanding is:
it’s crucial to separate (1) and (2) and (3) and (4)—these are distinct assertions and also these assertions aren’t equally debatable
the response to Baptist’s 2014 book has focused a lot on (3), which is unfortunate, since (1) and (2) and (4) are important in themselves
Baptist talks—in a 2016 interview—about (1) and (2):
Enslaved people actually used the term “pushing system” to refer to the ways that enslavers forced them to work faster. This included methods like naming the fastest “hands” with the hoe as “captains.” A squad of 10 or 12 would then be forced to keep up with the “fore row.” But even more important was the system of measurement and whipping that essentially outsourced innovation in all-important cotton harvesting to enslaved people themselves. It isn’t just moving faster—it’s about figuring out how to move more efficiently, even ambidextrously. In effect, they had to do time-and-motion studies on themselves. Daily picking would be weighed, and those who failed to meet their individual quota were whipped. Over time, those who met their quotas often saw their quotas raised. This increase forced enslaved people to pick faster and faster, and helped to drive a 400 percent increase in the average individual’s cotton-picking productivity between 1800 and 1860.…
In any other context, we’d call the systematic whipping of people who don’t meet production quotas—or of people who try to hide their maximum picking capacity—by the simple word “torture.” We’ve all heard decades of implicit and explicit arguments that paint enslaved African Americans as people who needed to be whipped or otherwise subjected to violence so that they wouldn’t revolt, so that they would actually work hard, etc. So we don’t call torture by its name. We’ve heard it called “discipline,” as if we are talking about spanking children. This refusal to name things by their real names, I’m convinced, has long-term effects on how people—even African Americans, at times—perceive black suffering.
And look at these striking 2021 comments from Chomsky:
So, let’s take a look at it, ask who we are and what we are. This is not something irrelevant to American history. It’s the basis of U.S. economic prosperity; that’s why I’m privileged.…
A lot of this is just coming to light. Edward E. Baptist’s book, The Half Has Never Been Told, provides an astonishing picture of things that maybe professional historians knew something about, but certainly the general public, even the informed public, wasn’t informed about. I didn’t know a lot of the things he described; they were way beyond the horrors that I knew about. A lot of this is just beginning to come out after hundreds of years. It’s about time.
Let me emphasize this comment:
A lot of this is just coming to light.
We’re just starting to excavate this stuff now—it’s incredible to think about it.
Second Example: The British Empire
Caroline Elkins’s 2022 book just came out:
Legacy of Violence (2022)
See the following comments about this just-published book:
Elkins’s “detailed description of British policy and actions in Ireland, India, Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya, Nyasaland, Jamaica, and Palestine makes for unsettling, yet necessary reading”
the book explores “how the long history of ruthless violence in the British Empire was entangled with liberal ideology”
the book shows how the British Empire “suppressed” its “history of colonial terror” through “destruction of archives” and through “manipulation of the historical record”
See Chomsky’s striking 2022 comments:
The hideous record of centuries of British imperialism is just barely beginning to come to light. Now, Caroline Elkins has a very important book [Legacy of Violence] just out on the history of British imperialism. Shashi Tharoor, who’s Indian, came out recently with a book on the history of British imperialism [Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India]. This is just beginning to lift the veil on the hideous crimes that Britain was committing for centuries.
Let me emphasize the following comment:
The hideous record of centuries of British imperialism is just barely beginning to come to light.
So as with US slavery, the excavation is just happening now before our eyes.