Plantation ethics and the white body’s burden
Soon after an American baby is born, they are put into a cute little onesie. But at the same time, they also get fitted with a heavy, invisible backpack. This backpack burdens them and restricts their movements, usually for many years—until they recognize that they are carrying it and choose to do something embodied about it.
Because we Americans typically carry this backpack from our earliest days, most of us don’t even realize it’s there. It seems normal, standard, and natural to us. Many of us carry it to our graves.
This backpack is metaphorical, of course. Yet it causes very real constriction, fear, and weariness in the bodies of hundreds of millions of Americans.
This practice of forcing backpacks on our newborns began on 17th-century plantations in the American South. Yet it’s not just African American bodies that bear such burdens. Most white-bodied Americans are fitted at birth with their own plantation backpacks. These contain multiple embodied advantages, but they also hold multiple embodied burdens.
In the rest of this blog entry, we’ll look at the backpacks that weigh down so many white-bodied Americans. In my next blog entry, we’ll do the same for African Americans and the plantation backpacks they carry.
The very word plantation is an attempt to sanitize a widespread form of historical brutality. American plantations were forced-labor camps. People were imprisoned there against their will and forced to toil for long hours, growing cotton and other crops, while others profited from their labor.
Forced-labor camps are not historical artifacts. Today, China operates them on a massive scale. The Chinese government recently rounded up over half a million Uighurs and other Muslims and forcibly relocated them to these camps. These enslaved people now pick cotton under the watchful eyes of security guards employed by the Chinese government. America has its own versions of forced-labor camps: state and federal prisons. In these, workers are paid as little as $1 a day, yet the collective value of their labor is estimated at well over $1 billion per year.
On American plantations in the 1600s through 1800s, there was little rule of law as we know it today. With few limitations, each plantation owner was the sole local authority who did whatever he pleased. If you were an enslaved person on a plantation, its owner could torture you, kill you, or sell you at any time. He controlled your body and your choices. He could rape you for pleasure, production, or profit. He and others had unfettered access to Black bodies. On his land, which had earlier been stolen from its Indigenous inhabitants, he was a despot and, effectively, a god.
Plantation ethics were not built on justice or morality. They were built on violence, raw power, and racial domination, and there was a feralness to them that is echoed elsewhere by the Taliban. This was the plantation owner’s creed: I do whatever I want, to any Black body I want, whenever I want, using every tool at my disposal: fear, humiliation, scripture, incarceration, violence, murder. For Black bodies on my land, I am the only authority and the only person who matters. I dominate; Black bodies obey. On my land, white safety, comfort, and leisure are always more important than Black humanness.
Plantation owners also dominated poor whites with much cruelty and feralness, although poor white bodies had some legal protections that Black ones did not.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, fewer than one percent of white Southerners actually owned plantations. Nevertheless, enslavement and plantation ethics extended far and wide. During the first half of the 19th century, a third of all white Southern families enslaved at least one African American; on average, they enslaved and dominated four to five. Although fewer than one percent of Southerners owned plantations, the ethics of plantations superseded geographical locale, spread far and wide, and became embodied.
Now let’s fast forward to today—February 1, 2021—when many white bodies continue to live by plantation ethics. Until two weeks ago, our country had a president who lived by plantation ethics and saw the entire country as his plantation. “I’m the only one that matters,” Donald Trump said in a 2017 TV interview. Later, he told America’s governors, “If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time.” On January 6 of 2021, he urged his supporters—who were and are overwhelmingly white—to ignore the rule of law, storm the U.S. Capitol, and commit widespread violence. They did.
Here are the five most deep-seated beliefs inside the plantation backpacks that weigh down white American bodies:
- The white body is the supreme standard by which all other bodies are judged, structurally and philosophically.
- The safety, comfort, and leisure of white bodies always trump the interests, needs, and survival of bodies of culture.
- As someone with a white body, I have the right to do whatever I want to any body of culture I want—especially any Black body.
- My whiteness entitles me to every one of the advantages in my backpack.
- Bodies of culture—especially Black bodies—are the cause of the constant weight, constriction, and fear that I experience in my own body.
Left unaddressed, these burdens spawn an array of other beliefs, behaviors, and activities. All of them are harmful to human beings; the great bulk of them are lies; most are trauma responses. A complete list would fill pages, but here are a few: entitled white rage; white pseudo-fragility; Indigenous invisibility; racialized dodges and gaslighting; white contrition override; and white exceptionalism.
All of this may sound dispiriting. But, as you know, a backpack—no matter how heavy or burdensome—can be removed.
If you have a white body, and you’re ready to acknowledge and interrogate your own advantages and burdens, here is a place to start:
Body Practice
Lynching has been part of American life for almost 200 years. The practice began in the South in the 1830s, but then spread north, into the vast majority of states. It has continued well into my lifetime: in 1981, African American Michael Donald was lynched in Mobile, Alabama by the Ku Klux Klan. Three out of four people killed by lynchings were African American; the overwhelming majority of lynchers have been white.
Although some lynchings were carried out in private or secret, often they were public performances meant to excite and entertain a crowd of white Americans. People took photographs of the corpses—and, sometimes, of the white perpetrators posturing nearby, like big-game hunters posing next to their kills. Many of these photos were made into postcards, which were sold and traded like baseball cards.
In a moment, I’ll ask you to view two disturbing images, one at a time. The first is from a photograph taken after a 1920 lynching in Duluth, Minnesota. I’ve removed the three African American corpses from the image, so you can focus on the white faces and bodies. These Americans carefully posed for this photo, which was illuminated by the headlights of two cars that were driven into position. The original photo, which included the three executed Black bodies, was later made into a postcard.
The second photograph, which you will probably recognize, was taken almost exactly 100 years later. Because the link to it takes you to another website, you may need to scroll down a bit to see the full image.
Look at the first image closely for five seconds:
First Image
Then look at the other for another five seconds:
Second Image
Repeat this process at least five times, toggling back and forth between the two images, and staying with each one for at least five seconds (or, if you can’t do it for the full five seconds, as long as you can).
As you move back and forth between the images, pay close attention to what you experience in your body. What arises in you as you move back and forth? What physical sensations? What images? What urges or impulses? What movements or actions? Where do you experience quaking? Where do you experience constriction?
Once you have gone back and forth at least five times, stop. Feel free to write down what you experienced.
Don’t just do this practice once. Do it at least once a day, preferably every day.
On the tenth day, compare what you experience in your body to what you experienced the first time you did this practice. Do the same on the 20th day, and the 30th, and periodically thereafter.
This practice is what I call an invited rep—an opportunity for growth that you deliberately bring into your daily life. Invited reps help you get used to pushing beyond your limitations, and to leaning into challenges and discomfort, rather than reflexively recoiling from them. (For more details on invited reps and life reps, see my earlier blog entry, “Unlocking the Genius of Your Body.”)
Of course, this one simple activity—repeated daily or regularly—won’t magically remove your plantation backpack. But it will help you begin the necessary process of acknowledgment, interrogation, and growing up in relation to trauma and race.
Ultimately, white-bodied Americans need to begin working collectively. Together, they can acknowledge the backpacks weighing them down; interrogate what is inside and behind them; and begin to remove these debilitating burdens from each other’s backs.
If you have an African American body, please stay tuned. In my next blog entry, you’ll have a chance to begin removing the plantation backpack that likely burdens you.