Its called the future of the africanamerican and pass. Its an hour and 45 minutes. A am from columbia in University Monitoring this second session on slavery and freedom. I want to thank the organizers of this conference. We all know how much work went into putting this whole thing together so thank you very much while to those from the museum and the association. Ago i gave my last class at columbia university. I am now writing off into the sunset. [applause] of retirement. You will indulge me for just a minute as i read what briefly on my own experience in relation to this field of African American history. Emblematic of several things that have happened in the last couple of generations. I grew up in a family in which africanAmerican History, in theh ignored education that i got in grades and high school, nevertheless, the black experience was considered in my family central to American History. And were friends of my family. I still have a photo my mother gave of myself sitting on Paul Robesons shoulders, at age two probably seemed like a long way up. My uncle philip was prolific in the fields of labor history and africanAmerican History. My father also is a story in publish the book on a book on black military experience. Part in thei took march on washington in 1963. I also took part in the much less wellknown march in washington in 1957. Not wellknown part of our history. ,s an undergraduate at columbia i was lucky enough to take my first history course with a , blackor who assigned reconstruction in america. That was not done at an ivy league institution. The first taught course and africanAmerican History ever given in the over 200 year history of columbia university. The field was just beginning to get going outside of black adversities, where it had always existed, of course. I gave eric holder a b. That was a respectable grade back then. Obama issueddent an executive order raising that great. Formertudents students here at the conference are rita roberts and stephanie small world a smallwood who are blogging away. Who use on action last night. When she was an undergraduate she had to split her time between excellent historical work and organizing to get holdingsto do best its that were connected with so africa south africa. And leslie harris, who is also on our program as one of our students. I chair the Committee Later on that established the institute for research in africanamerican studies at columbia and hired as our first director, the late and lamented. This is why i want to tip my hat to money and his coworkers. This museum that will open soon is a dream come true for all of inwho have labored africanAmerican History for a long time. Hank you and everyone [applause] the first battle has settled the question who is black america, this panel has to decide what the narrative paradigm is that best structures africanAmerican History. One of the most influential works in this area in the 20th franklins john hope textbook from slavery to freedom. That is a simple, compelling idea of slaverys freedom. It suggests that emancipation is the pivot of the black experience and perhaps of the whole american experience. There was also an alternative textbook out there which many of you are familiar with, from plantation to get a ghetto. One form of exploitation succeeded by another form of exploitation. I think it is fair to say that slavery to freedom narrative has been the dominant one, although under considerable challenge in the Current Issue of the journal of southern history, Carole Pemberton has an article on writing, the freedom narrative, which is a new essay on both that challenge the celebratory account from slavery to freedom. Looks like jim downs escape from freedom,more than freedoms frontier, one of the things i hope our congress will enable us to discuss is this familiar slavery to freedom paradigm makes sense as a way of understanding the trajectory of rock black history. And why at this moment, when people might want to field celebrity tori we are coming to of a second term of the nations first africanamerican president. Another question is what are the implications for understanding from they and freedom trend towards localizing American History and africanAmerican History, and also emphasizing the connections between slavery and capitalism. When the interpretive focus become so broad and global and abstract how can individual historical actors be factored into the story . What role can slave resistance, for example, play in a story that is operating in the global at the global level. Then theres the question of reconstruction and how we should think about that hereinafter the end of slavery. Should it be viewed as a southern event, what happens to the africanamerican component if we expanded to include the west, expand its timeframe. Does the sentry the south reduce the importance of that era for africanAmerican History. How does this era of slavery and emancipation exist today in public consciousness, in movies come in memorials, and flags and museum. . Ow should we commemorate it these are all big questions. We have a panel of big thinkers who can look at them. Some of the photographs are a little antiquated. In the booklet that we have, i will not repeat their bios, this. Brendader qu stevenson from ucla. Brenda was stuck in berlin yesterday. Her plane was canceled and she is in the air as we need. I will read her remarks secondly. Universityrom duke and a net gordon reed from Harvard History department and law school. A fat 10ive them each minutes. I turn the floor over to Walter Johnson. [applause] thank you. I cant say anything as dramatic as i was raised on the shoulder says paul robeson. Meet. Sponsors. To the , and an honor to be here to reacquaint myself and to meet so many of the people who are my heroes. I want to acknowledge my , who was the first person who help me think through the fact that if we are going to try to write africanAmerican History we need to imagine we will have to reconstruct the very categories of historical analysis. That is an idea that i think has been shared and expressed by a lot of the folks in this room. I want to try today to walk a little bit around the question of freedom, and to try to think through the notion of freedom and to figure out how a certain foreshortened version of freedom has shaped the history of slavery. Thata sent me a secret tax text, that i get her time. [applause] can find the statement in one variety or another. Dehumanizes inflamed people. I think their problems that unfold from there. I think they are ethical problems in that statement. I am going to try to do everything briefly and stop saying that im going to do it briefly. Part of the problem with that statement is that the institution of slavery is one of infinite variety, the humane things that the inhumane things that humans do to each other. One of the things they do is to misunderstand the character of human beings. There is an implication of permanence in the notion of the humanization that is baleful. It is much more productive to think of the condition of humanity and what it means to be a humana human under slavery. Under the terrorist again perverse pleasures of slaveholding relied up from the notion upon the notion of freedom. Problem a deep ethical and historians of the 20th and 21st century casting doubt on the humanity of pass to store go it raisescal actors. When theion of africanamerican people were human again. Finally, i think it takes a statement about our own perceived ethical distance from the perpetrators, our ability to cast them as in human and takes that and attributes it as a characteristic of the victims, they have been dehumanized. There is an essential difference between arguing somebody acted inhumanely and arguing the effect of their action was to dehumanize the victim. Behind all of these slippages, i think there is an unacknowledged ethical premise. Im going to read you a quotation from a not so recent but very influential book on history. I read it because not because it is particularly obtuse, but it is emblematic of presumptions which frame a lot of work done on the issue of slavery and some have framed some of the work i have done on the history of slavery. Whenever masters implicitly or explicitly recognized the independent will and volition of their slaves, they acknowledged the humanity of their bond people, extracting this admission was in fact a form of slave resistance. Because slaves opposed the dehumanization inherent in their status. Powerful sentence that collapses three different things. It collapses the notion of humanity into the notion of resistance, right . People are human when they resist. That leaves aside the question, for instance, of despair. What about enslaved despair . What about enslaved suicide . And correspondingly, we see we do not have histories of these things the way we should, again with the exception of mel paynters slavery. The other thing is it leaves out the possibility of enslaved flourishing, for reasons we can all understand, the minute i say the words happy and slave together, nevertheless, we have no history of laughter in slavery. We have a very, very thin history of love. There is a collapsing of enslaved humanity into resistance, i. E. Into the terms of enslaved peoples relationship with slaveholder. Finally, there is a collapsing of the notion of resistance into independent will and volition, and that is the thing i will focus on the most. There is a collapsing of the notion into a particular form of what i would call the notion of what a human being is, a person who makes independent decisions. That is a notion of human subjectivity i will note would be foreign to nat turner. Nat turner does not think he is a person who has independent will and volition. He thinks he is the fingertip of gods providence. He acts out of the notion of sacred duty rather than independence. I want to call that into question. Now the thing that i guess i can confidently say is that that figure of freedom is the very figure of freedom that is being promulgated all over the world by the european imperial slaveholding powers as the notion of freedom. It is a notion of freedom, freedom based on the rights of the citizen that is historically framed by the problem of slavery and empire. So what i am interested in trying to do in the slightly longer and more convoluted paper i have posted is to try to rework our notions of justice and human rights in the light of the history of slavery. It is to try to treat slavery as the central moral event of modernity, to try to retheorize justice and freedom from the perspective of slavery and really the perspective of the continent of africa. Doing so would require us to give a thorough going account of what sort of Institution Slavery was and what we think of the enduring ethical and historical relevance of slavery, which i am planning to do in the remaining three minutes i have. [laughter] Walter Johnson following cedric andnson and w. E. B. Du bois, this is the dubois of as well as the essay on the souls of white folk which you should read instead of listening to the rest of what i have to say. I want to try to think about slavery as a form of racial capitalism. I want to think about the histories of exploitation through capitalism and racial domination through negro phobia, as in fact identical to one another in many ways. It would take a lot of work to actually substantiate for you the notion that when we say the word capitalism, we should always say the word slavery. That they are not two different things. That is why want to say racial capitalism, but i will give you a few examples of why i want us to try to push, to insist upon saying racial capitalism, to insist upon an analysis of antiblackness alongside our analysis, inextricable from the analysis of capitalism. If you cannot use the word capitalism to describe the exportation for sale of 12 Million People across the atlantic ocean, i am not sure what usefulness the term has. It seems to me that is the first challenge to the history of capitalism that does not acknowledge slavery and its as its central aspect. But one can map what we take to be the capitalist economy of the 19th century, particularly great britain, the capitalist economy for those who want to define capitalism as if it was only something that happened in manchester. If you actually make a map of that economy, you recognize it is an agricultural economy that works on a yearly basis of advances. What happens is the cotton merchants in liverpool make credit advances to planters in louisiana. And those advances are made against the cotton crop. Sometimes the cotton crop comes in short, and the advance from liverpool to louisiana is not going to get paid off by the time the cotton comes in. So then there is a debt, and that debt has to be collateralized. So there is the atlantic system of slavery, which everybody acknowledges the 19th century to be the moment where capitalism dawned in the cotton mills in lancashire. The two modes of collateral are human beings and land. It is not that slavery was capitalist. Enslaved people were the capital. The other form of collateral is land, and that is land that we could just kind of here relate to the paper that ty miles did this morning. That is expropriated land. Most notably, that land is covered by the Supreme Court decision, johnson versus macintosh of 1823. My colleague gordonreed could correct what im going to say, but this is a foundational case in history of United States property law. If you go back to the origins, and try to go back and figure out why is it we legally owned the things we owned. At the bottom of that legal trail, you will find johnson versus macintosh. This is the case which says that native americans are not allowed to sell land to individual white settlers. All native American Land must be aggregated under the federal government. In order to be distributed through a capitalist land market to white settlers. So at the very bottom of property relations in the United States, there is imperialism, racial difference, and capitalist mode of distribution. That is the foundation. That is the foundation of our property law. So those are some of the pathways i would try to use to elucidate this notion of racial capitalism, which i can do more on the questions and it is elucidated a bit better in the paper, in the paper that is posted on the website. What i what to do with the low bit of time i have remaining is outline what i think the benefit would be of bringing slavery to the center of our question of what we call human rights or global claims of justice to understand slavery in this particular version of slavery i have just tried to outline as the central, moral event of modernity. Mounts thel, it critique of injustice from the standpoint of african america, native america, the global south and not from europe. It makes europe a central problem rather than the site of the elaboration of notions of justice. Secondly, and this goes to some of the questions earlier, it is focused on the question of extraction and distribution with between classes and areas of the world. It proposes a generalization of the account of the historical wrongs based on the experience of those in europes dark workingclass, so it takes the experience of dark workingclass of the world and generalizes that as the experience we should use to characterize justice claims everywhere. It is historically deep. It analyzes and emphasizes ways in which present distribution of privileges and projections are related to past patterns. It is in that way, i think, a powerful antidote to colorblind liberalism, right . It says we need to think about historical distribution, not simply contemporary distributions. If this is on slavery as a wrong goes to gender and sexuality, in the ways alienation, subordination of reproduction of one group of people to the purposes of another were the core feature of the human wrongs of slavery. It brings questions of gender, reproduction and sexuality to , the heart of our question of global justice. Finally, and i think that this is important. If one is really to understand the history of capitalism and slavery, one would write a paper about the instrumentalization of beings to the instrumentalization of nature, to think about the development of cotton plants, cotton plants were genetically hybridized to meet the capacity of a human hand. And human beings were ethically and violently narrowed down to the capacity of their hands. Those two things, the instrumentalization of human being and nature are directly related to one another. I think finally, we would want to imagine that from the standpoint of slavery, the history of slavery, we can their eyes a notion of global justice that is vigorously environmental but is not simply green. It is not predicated on politics or sustainability of standing order. It is theorized according to the politics of sustainability of a future imagined more just order. , thank you very much. [applause] eric foner thank you, walter. s paper ishensons entitled, us never had big funerals or weddings on the place. The ritualized black family in the wake of freedom. Lorna was clear about her complaints in rural life in mississippi. Slave people could not create, celebrate, protect or ritualized family life. According to her, there were few ritualized events that signified the beginning or end of kinship ties. Us never had no big funerals or weddings on the place, didnt have no marrying of any kind. Folks in those days just sort of hitched up together and called themselves man and wife. On the surface it might not , appear to be correct, or at least not applicable. With regard to marriage, some enslaved blacks in the south jumped the broom and some even had elaborate weddings. But there is a more profound truth about the social identity and status of enslaved blacks. None of their weddings signified a legally binding marriage contract. And the actual bride and groom freely chose a few of the designated aspects of their marriage rituals. It was not unusual for slaveowners to insist on certain details of the marriage ritual that turned the event into something of a minstrel show for a white audiences benefit. While there is little doubt many enslaved people who married typically found some meaning and even joy in the events that constituted that they were husband and wife. These