Is there any point to referring to slaves as "enslaved persons"?

In My Humble Opinion
1

One night last week I watched The African Americans on PBS, hosted, methinks, by Henry Louis Gates, though I could easily be wrong. During this look at the history of black people in the United States, I noticed that Gates and his fellow histories routinely and obviously eschewing the word “slave,” preferring the circumlocution “enslaved persons.” While I understood their basic intent, it still seemed pointless to me. I can’t see how the phrase is any less or more dehumanizing than the single word. It just struck me as an attempt to distancing oneself from the mindset of the slave-owners. But in so doing it also distances one from the slaves.

But that’s just me. Any thoughts from the rest of you?

Oh, and poll in a moment.

2

Huh. When I was talking with my third graders about slavery a few weeks ago, I found myself uncomfortable referring over and over to “slaves,” settling instead on “people who were enslaved” or “enslaved people.” I’m not sure why I did that, but I think it had to do with agency: I wanted students to be thinking about slaves primarily as people, not primarily as chattel, because I wanted them to be asking themselves always what the slaves thought and felt and decided to do about their situation.

3

I’m not sure where you’re at: you say you understand the intent, but don’t know if there’s a point. I guess you’re saying that you don’t know whether the point they’re making is worth the extra syllables?

I’m sure their intent is that saying someone is a ‘slave’ implies – at least to some small degree – both that they are just a slave, not really human, and also that it is permanent and inherent, and a product of the impersonal universe (as if being a slave was like being left-handed or something), whereas calling them an ‘enslaved person’ distinctly recognizes their humanity and makes the point that particular people made the slavery happen.

So is it worth the extra syllables? I’m not sure. I think that in, say, a half-hour show, it’s absolutely worth doing the substitution at least once, in a place where the distinction is particularly sharp. Its’ a point worth making when we discuss slavery.
Is it worth doing it every single time? Could there be a better use of the minute you’d spend on repeating those four extra syllables over and over? Maybe. But I can accept the argument to, as a matter of principle, not use ‘slave’ when you could be recognizing the person’s humanity instead.

4

Emancipationally Challenged Individuals?

5

Yeah, probably. I’m also uncomfortable with calling people “slave owners”, like there is some legitimacy to one person owning another. Words do matter.

6

This makes just about as much sense. What’s the point in trying to mitigate the horror of slavery by using circumlocutions?

Let kids learn history the way it happened, not the way some politically correct dweeb tries to sugarcoat it.

7

Change must start small, and is radical at its beginning

Within living memory, we can remember old, archaic terms for the mentally ill, LGBT’s, racial minorities, the disabled, etc. I don’t think this is any different except that there are no slaves anymore so there’s less of a push to redefine the term for modern people without an existing group to call for such change. I’ve been taught that you don’t want to assume anyone’s defined by some specific attribute unless they want it, and since language plays such a huge part in not only what people think but how they think, I don’t mind this change.

It’ll sound silly today and a year from today, but less silly 10 or 20 years down the line. When a generation of kids grow up saying “enslaved persons”, society will be hard pressed to change back. And really, who would force that issue?

How is changing how they are referred to mitigating the horrors of slavery? And really, if you really wanted to be authentic to history, wouldn’t you have to refer to them by much harsher terms?

8

I can kind of see the point. Calling someone an “enslaved person” rather than a “slave” emphasizes that (1) slaves are people too, and (2) their status as a slave is something that has been imposed upon them.

On the other hand “enslaved persons” is way more cumbersome to say, plus “persons” just sounds silly.

9

I can see the point, though my initial instinct is to roll my eyes. It emphasizes the fact that they were people first, and slavery was something imposed upon them, rather than slavery being who they were.

Some family members and I - all of whom are rather notorious for our dark sense of humor - sat through a lecture from someone who used this phrase, and we ended up having a fairly inappropriate brainstorm afterwards to come up with alternative labels. I think “Involuntary Immigrant” ended up being the winner.

10

It’s just another step on the euphemism treadmill.

11

I don’t think it’s mitigating the horrors of history so much as re-shaping…or gently nudging… the way we think about the people involved. Maybe during the time they were enslaved they were just slaves. Just pieces of property to be bought and sold and cast aside.

But before that and after that they were people - to everyone, even slave owners! - and remembering them as people who became enslaved seems more correct to history than just remembering the time in their lives when they were slaves.

I mean, you don’t think of concentration camp prisoners as just prisoners. [Jewish] Survivors no doubt consider themselves Jewish people first and foremost, then concentration camp survivors.

12

One word refers to something that happened to them, against their will. The other refers to something they were, something that was innately part of them (albeit forced upon them).

I kind of like the term “enslaved” now that I think about it, but they should drop “persons,” as that sounds redundant to me. “Mary Jane was born enslaved” or “John Smith was formerly enslaved” sounds better to me than “Mary Jane was born an enslaved person” or “John Smith was formerly an enslaved person.” Really? So we’re talking about people here, not horses or dogs with human names? Glad you cleared that up for me.

13

It has its place. “Enslaved people”, “those enslaved”, “those held in slavery”, “an enslaved farm worker”–All can help to visualize the people involved as people, and to remind us that slavery wasn’t something that just happened, it was something that people consciously and deliberately did to other people. I know I’ve used some of these phrases myself, on this board.

I do draw the line, though, if I need to talk about slaves 20 times in one paragraph. I mean, at some point, duh, we get it that slaves were people . . . nobody goes around enslaving aliens from Andromeda. To my knowledge, anyway.

14

Well, there is a point of a sort, but I am not sure it is a good one. Perhaps it highlights their personhood, but it also seems to blunt the emotional impact a bit, and I doubt that that is something we we want to do.

And why “persons” rather than “people”? In some ways that is the worst part of it.

15

I agree. One of the main reasons slavery existed so long was that people avoided thinking of slaves as people like themselves. Slavery was a lot easier to live with if you thought of slaves as being something completely separate. Calling them enslaved people emphasized their common humanity.

That said, it seems like more of a moot point nowadays. I don’t think there’s any significant pro-slavery movement left in the world and virtually everyone now recognizes that slaves were people. This is a moral battle that’s been won.

16

What would you call them, then, in a history class dealing with the institution of slavery?

I think it’s important to understand the humanity and the diversity of the enslaved population, and the fact that they were not just pieces of property, but it seems to me that simply substituting the word “enslaved persons” for “slaves” doesn’t really help very much unless it’s accompanied by a more thoroughgoing study of their lives and conditions.

I’m teaching the US History survey at my university this semester, and the whole second half of the semester is devoted to the period from the drafting of the Constitution to the Civil War. The institution of slavery is something we deal with in almost every class meeting over this period, and even when we’re not dealing with it directly, we’re often talking about how attitudes to slavery and free soil affected national politics.

And, for the most part, when talking about the people concerned, i use the terms “slaves” and “slaveowners” or “slaveholders.”

None of this is intended to imply that “slaves” is all they were, and nor is it intended to suggest that i believe that there is some legitimacy to one person owning another. To the extent that i want my students to understand the humanity of the slaves, and the variety of their experiences, i do this by getting them to actually read about those things, using both primary and secondary historical sources. I think that this is far more important than whether i use the term “enslaved persons.”

Similarly, we read about the slaveholders themselves, and their attitudes to the slaves. We read diaries from plantation owners like Bennett Barrow, treatises by pro-slavery authors like George Fitzhugh, and slave narratives by authors like Solomon Northup and Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass, that give a sense of the brutalizing nature of the institution.

While i’m committed to the task of humanizing the slaves and conveying to my students some sense of the slave experience, i’m not really worried that my terminology is likely to imply support for the institution, or push some students to one side of the fence or the other. As Little Nemo’s observation suggests, this is not exactly an issue that divides my classroom, in terms of the students’ politics. They’re all pretty firmly in the anti-slavery camp.

17

1 vote for “an enslaved person” / “enslaved people” here. This highlights their humanity without being as awkward.

18

If we had such a system I would +1 this post.

19

Nope.
It just sugarcoats things until no one was responsible for anything in history.

I loved Captain America for it’s, “Oh we totally have an Asian, Irish, Italian, etc etc on our brute squad!” Also that Mel Gibson movie, “No we are freed people, we’re totally not slaves!”
Seriously in 50 years, no one but Nazi’s will be slave owners and white people will have been slaves too.

I get the reason for “enslaved person” to give them agency and all that, but I’m a big fan of using harsh words that mean harsh things to get the serious point across.

So we don’t up with that one guy who said at that one fundraiser, “Why don’t we point out all the good things that black people got from slavery?”

20

Interestingly, I was going to make the point about the word “Jew”. It’s come up before on this message board that the term “Jew” is frowned upon, and should be replaced with “Jewish person”. You said that survivors consider themselves Jewish people first and foremost, rather than saying that they consider themselves to be Jews first and foremost. There is a parallel here to enslaved people and slaves. Both terms, Jewish people and enslaved people, emphasize the universal humanity of the people over a specific categorization. For people who have been marginalized and characterized as “other”, it can be very positive and self-affirming to be categorized as people first. [Which reminds me that I once worked with an organization for people with mental and developmental disabilities called People First]

The issue here is that in the context we are discussing, U.S. enslavement of people brought here from Africa and their descendants, there are no more slaves. So the discussion is purely historical, and while there may be some value in bringing a different cultural attitude to today’s citizens, there is no one left whose self-worth can be affirmed by being called an enslaved person, or even a formerly enslaved person. Which is my long-winded explanation of why I answered “possibly” to the poll.