I never understand these kinds of conversations. One cannot know from  
the outside. Anthropology spent much of the 1970s fighting about  
this, challenged by the Casteneda books. Whatever the truth about the  
books, it was finally agreed that the only way to fully understand  
Shamanism, is to be a Shaman. You can still be a PhD, if your two  
worlds exist concurrently but, the 18th century does not, so one  
cannot be in both. That time, that worldview, has evolved into our  
own. Beyond documentation, and the continuing basic humanity that is  
the bass chord of all history, it is gone. We can be much more modern  
and see this. I find it extremely difficult, for instance, to imagine  
a world in which women routinely were barred from the entire public  
political conversation, and could not vote. And that is less than a  
century in the past.  For my daughters my childhood remembrances of  
racism are esoteric horrors, like a distasteful fetish. Our  
grandchildren, as they face the reality of climate change, will look  
back at us and ask, How could they...

-- Stephan


On 1 May 2008, at 22:28, Jurretta J. Heckscher wrote:

> On Thu, 1 May 2008 18:14:36 -0400, [log in to unmask] wrote:
>
>> Sex between a slave woman and a free man was inherently coercive and
> nonconsentual.
>
> Let me dissent very slightly here to urge that we avoid categorical
> statements such as this.  Unquestionably, yes, sex between a slave  
> woman and
> a free man was usually coercive and nonconsensual; the documentary  
> record
> bears that out abundantly, just as one would expect.
>
> But not always.
>
> Most obviously, there was the common practice of black men who were  
> born
> free or managed to obtain freedom marrying or otherwise sexually  
> involving
> themselves with slave women in long-term relationships--and, if  
> they could,
> often buying these women eventually and in many cases freeing them,  
> despite
> all the weight of Southern law that militated against manumission.   
> So I
> would be inclined to think that sex between a slave woman and a  
> free black
> man was frequently noncoercive; instead, it was sometimes marriage or
> something approaching marriage in a society brutally unconcerned  
> with black
> marital legitimacy.
>
> Beyond that, however--and I realize Kevin was referring to sex  
> between slave
> women and free white men--even slave women/white men sexual  
> relationships
> were not always coercive.  This particularly subject is not my area of
> research, but my research has immersed me in the documentary record  
> of slave
> life in Virginia and surrounding states, and to my surprise I have  
> from time
> to time--certainly not often, but not extremely rarely, either-- 
> come across
> situations such as the following:
>
> * a slave woman and a white male indentured servant who form a  
> liaison and
> "run away" together
>
> * a white man of relatively little means who owns a few slaves, one  
> of whom
> lives with him as his wife in all but name, bears him children, and  
> who is
> freed with her children and inherits his property upon his death;
>
> * a white man who leases a slave woman for work, has children with  
> her,
> purchases her and her children, frees them all, and marries her;
>
> * a relatively well-off white man whose liaison with a slave woman  
> causes
> scandal to his family, whereupon he frees the woman and moves west  
> with her
> to a non-slaveholding area and they establish a permanent household  
> and
> family there;
>
> * a slave woman who forms a long-term liaison with a well-to-do  
> white man
> not her owner and despite her owner's opposition to the relationship.
>
> Obviously, it is possible that some or all of these relationships  
> and the
> unknown number of others similarly anomalous began coercively.  But  
> the more
> I study slavery, the more I am struck by how its structural cruelty  
> and
> injustice, and its capacity to elicit genuinely evil behavior in so  
> many
> instances from otherwise "normal" men and women, nevertheless  
> failed to
> eradicate altogether the human capacity for humane connection and
> interaction--sexually as well as maternally, filially,  
> companionably, and in
> other ways.
>
> Slavery made such bonds inherently unlikely, not least by actively  
> favoring
> their opposites.  It did not, however, make them impossible.   And  
> while the
> structure of slave society entitles us to presume coercion in any  
> free white
> male/slave female sexual liaison for which we have no evidence to the
> contrary, it seems to me that we ought not to preemptively  
> eliminate from
> our historical understanding the possibility of genuine humanity  
> even in the
> most unpromising and improbable of circumstances if the evidence so
> suggests.  It was, after all, just such common humanity that  
> slavery itself
> was designed to deny.  I am disinclined to grant its engines of
> dehumanization any victories it may not have won.
>
> --Jurretta Heckscher
>
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