Abstract
Drawn into the maelstrom of Western expansion, the Africans were torn from their homeland and swallowed up in the ever-increasing need for cheap labor in the pursuit of profit. With their participation in the process of Western expansion, objectified as chattel, the Africans and their descendants were doomed from the beginning to an ex istence characterized by social and cultural alienation; in a word, marginalization. This status would be codified by law, although it would extend much further into an evolving American culture and the African American soul.
In 1705, almost exactly a century after the first colonists had set foot on Jamestown, the House of Burgesses codified and systematized Virginia’s laws of slavery. These laws would be modified and added to over the next century and a half, but the essential legal framework within which the institution of slavery would subsequently operate had been put in place. It had taken the English in Virginia the best part of one hundred years to finalize their construction of a legal status quite unknown in the Common Law of England, to declare unequivocally that Africans were a form of property: that they were, and henceforth would remain, “Strangers” and “outsiders” who would be required to live out their lives according to an entirely different set of laws from those that governed people of European birth and ancestry.1
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Notes
Betty Wood, The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997), 92.
See Joseph E. Holloway, Africanisms in American Culture (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990)
and Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 95.
See, Richard L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future (New York: Harper Perennial, 1987). Professor Rubenstein makes a persuasive and powerful argument in this short but disturbingly potent text that the Holocaust and slavery were fundamentally connected through a virus that infects Western culture. In spite of the broad generalizations, the depth and the passion of his argument frightens and convinces, leaving one with a sense that while certain portions of his argument rests on family resemblances and perhaps informed intuition at best, it nevertheless rings profoundly true!
Edward J. Blum, W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2997), 122.
Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, Updated Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 168–169.
Matthew V. Johnson Sr., “The Middle Passage, Trauma and the Tragic Re-Imagination of African American Theology,” Journal of Pastoral Psychology. 53, no.6 (July 2005): 547–548.
Vincent Harding, There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 27.
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 22.
Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 71.
Roy F. Baumeister, Jon E. Faber, and Harry M. Wallace, “Coping and Ego Depletion: Recovery after the Coping Process,” In Coping: The Psychology of What Works, ed. C. R. Snyder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 50.
Robin Horton, “African Traditional Thought and Western Science,” in Rationality, ed. Bryan R. Wilson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1973), 147.
Cisco Lassiter, “Relocation and Illness: The Plight of the Navajo,” Pathologies of the Modern Self: Postmodern Studies on Narcissism, Schizophrenia, and Depression, ed. David Michael Levin (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 228.
Michelle Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), xxii.
Lerone Bennett, Jr., The Black Mood (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 63.
Alex Bontemps, The Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 2001), 142–143.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: New American Library, 1982), 8–9.
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© 2010 Matthew V. Johnson
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Johnson, M.V. (2010). Sparagmous, or “The Crucified”. In: The Tragic Vision of African American Religion. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109117_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109117_3
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