Per Caritatem

Like a voice crying out in the wilderness, Frederick Douglass speaks both eloquently and powerfully to the brutality and injustice of chattel slavery. For example, in his 1852 oration, “The Internal Slave Trade,” Douglass offers his own analysis and stringent condemnation of America’s participation in the trafficking of human beings for economic gain. He begins by drawing our attention to “the practical operation” of America’s slave industry, an industry “sustained by American politics and American religion! Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market.”[1] Driven around the country like mere animals, these men, women, and children are beaten, prod, and whipped, as they process in dirge-like fashion toward the New Orleans slave market. Douglass then zeros in on a few of these infelicitous, iron-clad souls—an elderly, gray headed man, a young mother with sun-scorched back and teary eyes carrying her infant child, a teen-aged girl mourning the violent separation from her mother. Tired and exhausted from hours of exposure to the blistering sun, the young mother begins to lag behind. Then you hear it—“a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul.”[2] What was this awful sound, followed by a high-pitched, piercing scream? The sound was a whip striking the young mother’s bare shoulder; the scream needs no explanation. As the slave traders drive this human herd to the auction block, where the males will be “examined like horses” and the women ”exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers,” Douglass implores us not to forget “the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude.”^[3]

This is simply one among many scenes depicting the hardships African American slaves endured on a daily basis as a result of the institution of chattel slavery. Enslaved by the love of money, the master’s vision becomes distorted. Not only does he see human beings as things, but the sounds of suffering fail to reach his muted ears. Deafened to the wailing of mothers torn from their children and children torn from their mothers, he transposes the dissonance of clanking chains into golden keys, which like the dual cut of a double-edged sword open the door to his future and secure the bonds of his brother.

To add to their humiliation and degraded status as mere property of the white man, slaves were subjected to public auctions where they were ordered to stand, often naked or nearly so, allowing the potential buyers to examine their bodies to ensure their suitability for long-term servitude. If a slave’s body showed signs of illness, disease, or possible weaknesses, they were passed over as bad investments, unprofitable for the master’s business. Scar tissue on a slave’s back—the number of scars, whether a scar was old or relatively fresh—became the subject of a mythology employed to determine a slave’s character. Too many scars indicated a rebellious spirit, whereas having few scars meant the slave possessed a docile, obedient spirit. “As they worked their way from inflicted scars to essential character, buyers fixed slaves in a typology of character according to the frequency, intensity, and chronology of the whipping apparent on their backs.”^[4] While the slaves stood humiliated, exposed and wondering what kind of master might purchase them on that particular day, the slave buyers paraded themselves before the crowds as augurs who “could read slaves’ backs as encodings of their histories.”^[5] The slave’s face, however, with its expressive capacities spanning the spectrum of human emotions—from compassion to agony, ecstasy to alarm—the face as the display case crafted to exhibit the eyes is of no interest to the slave buyers. Provided that it is free of work-hindering defects, the slave’s face is utterly insignificant to the purchase. “It was the instrumental value of these bodies that mattered to the buyer, their size and shape, the color and the ages, the comparability of parts and durability of attributes—not the faces.”^[6]

[1] Douglass, “The Internal Slave Trade,” 436.

[2] Ibid., 437.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Johnson, Soul by Soul, 145.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 142–3.

As Sharon Hays, Loïc Wacquant, and others have shown, dominant cultural narratives dispersed via mass media, political campaigns, educational and religious institutions and the like play a significant role in constructing social identities—for example, the “welfare queen,” the “black” male criminal, etc. Such narratives, along with others downplaying social responsibility (and overemphasizing an ahistorical, race-less, gender-less individualistic picture of responsibility, which fail to take into account the genuine disparities of experience between, for example, whites and blacks in America) influence public policies in ways that are often unacknowledged or not taken seriously.

As both Hays and Wacquant observe, the 1996 Personal Responsibility Act assumes and is underwritten by negative stereotypes of welfare mothers as social outcasts and moral delinquents. Following the lead of the aforementioned sociologists, I hope to engage in a (future) research project investigating the ways in which adopted, foster, and institutionalized children are likewise socially stigmatized by political, religious, and other narratives and how this influences legislation, family placement (i.e., what kind of families are considered as ideal, which are excluded and why), and long-term child development.

In addition, drawing from my dissertation research on Foucauldian power relations and socially constructed subjectivities, I imagine such a project unfolding via an analysis of the impact of certain medical  practices and categorizations imposed upon institutionalized children (e.g., how do labels such as “mildly,” “moderately,” or “severely developmentally and emotionally challenged” influence or put pressure on children to take certain medicines and undergo certain psychological therapies with which they are uncomfortable?). Many children in foster care have reported that they experienced sexual, physical, and emotional abuse both in state care and at the hands of their foster parents.[1] Some of this abuse included being overmedicated. For example, in a 2004 study of a random sample of 472 medicated youth in foster care in aTexas facility ages 0 through 19 years, the disturbing findings are as follows:

Of the foster children who had been dispensed psychotropic medication, 41.3% received ≥3 different classes of these drugs during July 2004, and 15.9% received ≥4 different classes. The most frequently used medications were antidepressants (56.8%), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder drugs (55.9%), and antipsychotic agents (53.2%). The use of specific psychotropic medication classes varied little by diagnostic grouping. Psychiatrists prescribed 93% of the psychotropic medication dispensed to youth in foster care. The use of ≥2 drugs within the same psychotropic medication class was noted in 22.2% of those who were given prescribed drugs concomitantly.[2]

The overall conclusion of this study was that “[c]oncomitant psychotropic medication treatment is frequent for youth in foster care and lacks substantive evidence as to its effectiveness and safety.”[3] Why then are these children being overmedicated? What is being done to prevent such abuse? Provocatively put, are these children being used as human lab rats? What resistance possibilities are available to these children given the asymmetrical power relations involved? (Just today I read this story in The Children’s Monitor, a publication of the Child Welfare League of America, confirming the abuse and overmedication of children in state care. For example, the article states that the children are given “doses that are too high”—some children were found to be on more than five medications simultaneously!  In addition, children under age one were given high-powered prescription drugs, and given the multiple caregivers, the unstable state supervision, and lax regulations, the medicines prescribed are improperly monitored, which often results in “gaps in prescribed regimens.” By clicking the following link, Giovan Bazan’s Story of Twelve Years of Overmedication in Foster Care, you can listen to one young man’s story of his own person experience with overmedication the foster care system. He is now an advocate for children in state care.)

Additional problems with this complex nexus of the state, children, and foster families include proper screening of foster parents. How can we prevent foster parents from simply using the system for the remuneration they receive from the state? Why do so many children to suffer abuse in their foster families? If new legislation, innovative practices, or other models are helping in any of these areas, how might we make these “tools” available nationwide?

Besides drawing from the insights of sociologists, critical “race” theory, and moral philosophy, I want to consider the contributions faith-based communities might have to offer with respect to re-imagining and creating more positive, affirming, and inclusive views of adoption and foster care, while also exploring the ways that certain narratives in these traditions—for example, narratives overemphasizing the biological family as the ideal family—have actually cultivated and helped to shape negative and stigmatized views of adopted and foster children and families. This is both ironic and unfortunate because many of these traditions have rich theological and ethical resources to offer with respect to a more diverse and difference-affirming view of families.

Wacquant has argued that there is an intimate connection between U.S.prisons and welfare/workfare. The former overpopulated with African American males—the special targets of a neoliberal state practicing laissez-faire policies toward the top social strata and punitive paternalistic intervention toward the lower social strata—and the latter often constituting socially stigmatized wives, girlfriends, and children of these inmates. Just as Wacquant has discovered structural similarities between prison-fare and welfare/workfare, perhaps there are additional structural commonalities to be found in relation to child welfare institutions.  Here my interdisciplinary study might include an examination of the architectural spaces in which these children live, paying attention to how such spaces impact a child’s emotional, intellectual, and physical development and well-being. My findings could then lead to new proposals with respect to implementing aesthetic and other improvements that serve and advance the welfare of institutionalized children.

Economic systems and the narratives they employ, as well as the ethos they produce must also be considered. As Margaret R. Somers and Fred Block have argued, American culture breathes market-driven air, and as a result “market fundamentalism” has played a leading role in reshaping how our society views welfare.[4] Similar to Wacquant’s and Hay’s conclusions, these scholars emphasize how new narratives are created that ignore or downplay larger historical, sociopolitical, and structural factors (such as systemic “racism” or “racial” bias). As a result, poor people are often unjustly constructed and construed as criminal, perverse, and the only ones to blame for their condition. For example, women who bear children out of wedlock are depicted as morally deficient and thus responsible for the burden they must bear. If a woman in this condition turns to welfare, the dominant “poverty to perversity” narrative depicts her as lazy, debauched, and overly reliant on the state and the “real” work of responsible citizens. Certain religious narratives likewise enter the picture, criticizing these women for abandoning their children for the workplace or for not being able to find a “respectable” mate.[5] Given the current anti-welfare ethos in theU.S., how might we begin to recreate a more positive, compassionate view of social welfare? Part of the re-form process—whether reforming legislative policies or re-forming the American imagination—is to raise public awareness of the structural “racial,” “gender,” and class disparities in place in American society, all of which produce tremendous challenges for impoverished women and children.

Undeniably, the United States has come a long way from the days of chattel slavery, and we can be encouraged by the positive strides made in racial relations and equality; yet, it is important to remember whence we came in order to avoid repeating past mistakes and so that we might become critically alert to new manifestations of racism and racial bias.^[1] Here we would do well to heed the words of Frederick Douglass’s 1852 oration, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Having accepted an invitation to speak to a predominately white audience in celebration of Independence Day, Douglass, as master orator and rhetorician, turns to a Psalm of lamentation—a passage with which his audience was thoroughly familiar—and interprets it as analogous to the situation of American slaves.

Douglass begins with the following lines:  “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song.”[2] The captors, having accomplished their mission, now command their Jewish captives, whose eyes still tear up when they recall Zion, to sing one of their native songs. To this obtuse, insensitive demand, Douglass, speaking the “plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people,”[3] asks, “[h]ow can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem […] let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”[4] Always poised and ready, like Socrates of old, to turn his public speaking invitations into opportunities to provoke and to challenge the ethico-political status quo, Douglass condemns his fellow citizens’ superficial “national, tumultuous joy” in celebration of America’s so-called “freedom” and independence. In fact, earlier in his speech, Douglass emphasizes the great “disparity” and “distance” separating him and his fellow citizens. The good fortune and “blessings” celebrated on this day do not apply to those of a darker hue. “The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me.”[5] Beyond the surface civility, the fanfare, and the laudatory refrains, Douglass remembers, Douglass hears “the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are to-day rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them.”^[6]

With this example of what Foucault calls “reverse discourse,” Douglass uses the familiar words of Scripture and says in effect, just as the Jews were taken captive by their oppressors, forced to dwell in a land not their own, similarly African American slaves find themselves as strangers in a strange land where they have been constructed as the savage, as the intellectually-inferior other in need of the white man’s culture, “superior” reasoning abilities, and “moral” direction. Like the Jews exiled in Babylon, the most suitable song, the song corresponding to the violent, unjust, degraded existence of an African American slave is not a song of triumphalist jubilation, but a song of sorrowful lament. For Douglass to gloss over this all-too-recent contemptible American history because he is no longer in chains would be to turn a deaf ear to the “mournful wail of millions” and to once again allow the white, hegemonic culture to write the black story. Moreover, Douglass reminds his audience—who, after all, function as analogues to the captors of God’s people of old—that God’s heart bleeds for the weak, the humble, the downtrodden. Though a merciful and forgiving God, divine justice unlike human justice will not, in the end, be mocked.

Césairean Négritude, as Rabaka observes, “is wide-ranging and grounded in black radical politics and a distinct pan-African perspective; a purposeful perspective aimed not only at ‘returning’ to and reclaiming Africa, but perhaps more importantly, consciously creating an authentic African or black self.”[1] A concern for solidarity with all colonized and enslaved people of African descent occupied Césaire and will likewise be Fanon’s concern. Césaire voices his pan-African perspective toward the end of his interview with Depestre. Having acknowledged that he and his colleagues “bore the imprint of European civilization,” Césaire then adds,

but we thought that Africa could make a contribution to Europe. It was also an affirmation of our solidarity. That’s the way it was: I have always recognized that what was happening to my brothers in Algeria and the United States had its repercussions in me. I understood that I could not be indifferent to what was happening in Haiti or Africa. […] And I have come to the realization that there was a “Negro situation” that existed in different geographical areas, that Africa was also my country. There was the African continent, the Antilles, Haiti; there were Matinicians and Brazilian Negroes, etc. That’s what Negritude meant to me.[2]

As part of his aim to establish a positive black identity, Césaire drew from various elements of his French educational training and created something new, something bearing the distinctive marks of the African spirit. For example, Césaire in no way denied the French influences shaping his work. “Whether I want to or not, as a poet I express myself in French, and clearly French literature has influenced me.”[3] Even so, Césaire states emphatically that while elements of the French literary tradition function for him as a “point of departure,” his goal has always been “to create a new language, one capable of communicating the African heritage.”[4] Here one might draw an analogy between Négritude’s relation to French culture and literature and the relation between African American jazz and European classical music. That is, just as African American musicians infused European musical practices with their own distinctive African-inspired rhythms, phrasings, and improvisatory emphases creating a new and unquestionably African-American music, Césaire, Senghor, and others took elements of the French intellectual traditional and reharmonized them to sound with a decisive African tonal center. “French was a tool that I wanted to use in developing a new means of expression. I wanted to create an Antillean French, a black French that, while still being French, had a black character.”[5]

With this new language as his weapon, Césaire begins his Discourse on Colonialism with a triple staccato firing of single sentence paragraphs, each carefully crafted to condemn Europe’s so-called civilizing mission.[6] Listen to Cesaire’s diagnosis of a “decadent,” “stricken” [atteinte], “dying” Western civilization[7]—a Europe revealed as “morally [and] spiritually indefensible.”[8]

A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.

A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization.

A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.[9]

Of course the culprit in view is European civilization, “Western civilization,” whose Enlightened and progressive vision has proved “incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem.”[10]

Unlike the white Marxists, including Sartre, Césaire and the Négritude writers could not separate the class problem from the race problem, nor did they overlook the connection between capitalism and colonialism. As Rabaka observes, “Césaire understands European civilization to rest on the colonization of non-Europeans, their lives, labor and lands. His Negritude, like Du Bois and James’s discourse, was a revolutionary humanist enterprise”,[11] attuned to the sufferings of all those exploited by the machinery of colonialism and slavery.  Although appreciative of Marx, the Negritude movement (and Fanon as well) sought to expand and revise Marxist teachings not only to include but to give top priority to race-based economic exploitation.[12]As Césaire puts it, the Communists “acted like abstract Communists” in their failure to address the “Negro problem.”[13] In contrast, the colonized and enslaved, given their concrete experience of racialized existence past and present, do not have the option to overlook the race question; thus, concludes Césaire, Négritude has a crucial role to play in the ongoing reformation of Marxism. “Marx is all right, but we need to complete Marx.”[14]

Césairean Négritude is thus concerned not only for the “political emancipation” of oppressed blacks but also, as we have seen, it has one of its chief goals the creation of a positive black social identity. However, in the context of colonialism, with their past already written and their present constantly under construction, the opportunities afforded the colonized to shape and develop their own identity are severely restricted and practically non-existent.  Because the colonial system is built on the exploitation of black others, the oppressed are increasingly viewed as things or as non-human animals. This reduction of human others to the subhuman realm harms both the colonized and the colonizer, and thus, leads to the degradation of society at large. Césaire refers to this phenomenon as the “boomerang effect of colonization.“[15] As he explains,

colonization […] dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and [is] justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out.[16]

Amidst obstacles that most of us can scarcely imagine, Frederick Douglass learned to read and write from a place of extreme marginality. His beginning steps—learning the alphabet—came through the tutelage of Sophie Auld, the wife of his master at that time, Thomas Auld.[1] His reading lessons, however, were ended abruptly when Mr. Auld realized what was happening.  Douglass recounts Mr. Auld’s reprimand to his wife and his commentary on why one ought not educate a slave.

[Douglass quoting Mr. Auld] “A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now,” said he, “if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.”[2]

Auld’s remarks on the dangers of teaching a slave to read and the seriousness with which he spoke made a strong impression on young Douglass.  In fact, a few lines later he says that he “now understood […] the white man’s power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.”[3] At that point in his life, Douglass vowed to himself that whatever it might take, he would learn to read.  His motivation was in large part due to the strong opposition he sensed in Mr. Auld to his becoming literate.  “What he [Mr. Auld] most dreaded, that I most desired. […]; and the argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn.”[4] In short, at this point in Douglass’s journey, his is convinced that his freedom can be achieved primarily through the attainment of literacy. Thus, he commits himself to achieving this goal at all costs.

Douglass, like Foucault, also perceives a connection between knowledge and power and that the asymmetrical master/slave relation is maintained by keeping the slave uneducated. Knowledge must flow in one direction—from master to slave. The (dominating) authority defining the master depends in part upon his ability to keep the slave ignorant and to (at least) create the impression of the master’s own intellectual superiority and ability to exercise local as well as socio-political and legal disciplinary actions should the slave rebel. As Lisa Sisco observes, “Douglass understands that literacy can provide the power to re-define relationships of authority.”[5] Literacy, however, must be understood as polysemous, dynamic, and occurring in stages. To emphasize the processive character of literacy, Sisco describes Douglass’s phase in which he realized that the productive nature of the power relation between master and slave was constituted and maintained in part by keeping the slave ignorant, as “pre-literate.”[6] At this stage, Douglass is not yet literate but is “attracted to an abstract ideal of literacy.”[7] As we shall see shortly, once he advances in his abilities to read, write, and engage in public discourse, he begins to experience the very double-sidedness of literacy described by Mr. Auld—“[a]s to himself [the slave], it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.”[8]

Sisco then brings Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptions of “authoritative discourse” and “internally persuasive discourse” into conversation with Douglass’s account of his movement from slavery to freedom. According to Bakhtin, individuals find themselves always and ever in the process of an “ideological becoming,” which is a “process of selectively assimilating the words of others.”[9] As historical beings we not only appropriate actively the discourses of others, but we are also shaped passively by these multiple discourses constituting what Bakhtin calls, “heteroglossia.” As Bakhtin explains, “authoritative discourse” or an “authoritative word” is more than simply a set of rules, directives, and fact-like information; it “strives rather to determine the very bases of our ideological interrelations with the world, the very basis of our behavior, it performs here as authoritative discourse, and an internally persuasive discourse.”[10]