Reflecting on slavery's grim history of objectification
When we begin presentations about the racial wealth gap, we pause at the beginning to reflect on these artifacts.
This week, we began jointly teaching at The Yale School of Management. The course is called “Race and Money in America, Contemporary Business Applications.” You can read more about it in the Yale Insights Magazine.
We kicked off the class as we generally start presentations on the racial wealth gap: with a few slides reminding students of the ways human beings were treated as property during slavery. This practice of objectification not only affected the lives of slaves before the Civil War, it also created ways of doing business that would extend into a mentality around Black Americans that lasted long after the Civil War.
Here are some of the artifacts we examine as part of this history:
As you see above, insurance companies provided insurance on slaves. The payouts if a slave was injured or killed went to the slave’s owner, not the slave’s family.
Slave traders advertised their lots widely. As was common in financial documents concerning slaves, only first names were listed.
Slaves were often treated terribly and some experienced physical violence. Scars, in some cases, lasted a lifetime.
We sometimes play this recording of Oprah speaking about documents from slave plantations that she has hanging in her home.
“Among the things that I treasure in my home. I have documents from slave plantations that have the names and ages and prices of slaves,” Oprah says. “And sometimes when I feel like there have been times when I’ve been in crisis or felt like things weren’t going the way I wanted them to go, I will go into that roman I will speak their names out loud. I will speak their names out loud: ‘Douglas and Jenna and Carrie and Sarah and Anna,’ and their ages and their prices and remind myself of how far I have come. And no crisis seems that much of a crisis after you’ve looked at the names, the ages, the prices of people who were before you who made this way possible.”
We will continue to post some of the lessons and insights from our historical research, on-the-ground reporting and also from our teaching.
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