Perhaps not, but it’s certainly the inference the Duke makes in the play – when he advises Brabantio to be contented with the match, he tells him that Othello’s virtues make him “far more fair than black,” not that Othello is a Christian, or that he shouldn’t object to sons-in-law from a different culture in general. (And yes, obviously early modern audiences understood and constructed race in different ways than we do today, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have such a concept at all.)
Up until maybe the 1970’s many American families had a household worker and they tended to be black. I’d bet quite a few of us or our parents or grandparents had one. My wifes fathers family had one in the 50’s.My grandmother, even though she was white, worked as one back in the 40’s.
If they were paid at all (my grandmother worked for room and board mostly) they were usually paid cash, under the table, with no thought of pension or even paying into social security.
Should also point out that Shakespeare made the first “oops, the baby is black” joke I’m aware of, in Titus Andronicus, and the problem seems to be the Queen’s unfaithfulness, not that the lover was a “blackamoor”.
Of course the English had a healthy disregard for all foreigners, especially the unfamiliar ones. But they did not have a special disregard for someone simply due to skin colour. That construct that Negroes were inherently subhuman or inferior seems to belong to the Americas.
Also, promising native Africans were often educated in the British university system during the late empire days. Idi Amin was notable for being the first local African leader not educated in Britain.
… leading up to the first “yo’ mama” joke:
“Thou hast undone our mother.”
“Villain, I have done thy mother.”
I just want to point out that you’re arguing Shakespeare with an English professor whose username is Fretful Porpentine.
Oh good, maybe she can tell us what a “rump-fed runion” is? Sounds rudely inappropriate.
“Aroint thee, witch!” the rump-fed runion cried
She.
Five characters is a dumb limit.
Well, the OED is not super-helpful on “runion” (“used as a general term of abuse, especially for a woman,” etymological origin unknown), but given the context (a farmer’s wife greedily eating all the chestnuts and not sharing with the witch, which is always a Very Bad Idea in early modern culture), “rump-fed” is almost certainly a fat reference. The editors of the Norton Shakespeare suggest “the fat-rumped, mangy slut” as a paraphrase.
That’s crap, if I’ve ever heard it - that an English professor, or a professor of history, can never be wrong, or deserves cringing respect. And I’m sure @Fretful_Porpentine doesn’t think that.
I’ve been on various academic discussion lists for 25 years, and believe me, I’ve seen enough highly distinguished professors talk enough nonsense in my time, especially when they get outside the narrow area of their speciality.
That’s not to say that I don’t respect expert knowledge on a subject. I have a high respect for it, but certainly not an automatic and excessive respect.
Literature and history, especially, can be very subjective.
In this case, if you asked 10 Shakespeare experts about Othello, you’d get 10 different answers. And if you asked 10 professors of Elizabethan history, you’d get another 10 different answers. And if you asked 10 professors who study the history of race relations, you’d get another 10 different answers.
It’s not acceptable to say that someone is a professor, and therefore their opinion must be right and you mustn’t argue with them. Only someone who hasn’t seen professors arguing and disagreeing among themselves would think that.
Again, that doesn’t mean that expert opinions don’t deserve respect. It means that experts can differ, and sometimes experts can talk nonsense as much as anyone else, especially in the humanities.
As far as race in Shakespeare is concerned, I agree 90% with @Fretful_Porpentine, and I think that he/she made some convincing points.
If you recall, I was arguing against the view of @md-2000 that Elizabethans were colour blind, and regarded marriage with ‘Blacks’ (in our understanding of the term) as normal.
My opinion, based on a lot of reading of Elizabethan history, including primary sources, is that Elizabethans generally had a strong sense of ‘otherness’, but there were degrees of otherness.
Otherness could mean Scottish or Flemish, or foreign from Western Europe, or foreign from further afield. It could mean Catholic, or (further along the scale) Muslim, or pagan ‘savages’ of North America.
Skin colour was one strong signal of otherness, but certainly not the only one. A ‘Negro’ or ‘Blackamoor’ was more other than a Moor from North Africa. A ‘savage’ was more other than an educated, literate, and high-status Muslim of any colour.
There wasn’t a simple division into Black and White.
It’s also important to remember that Elizabethans had as many different opinions and ideas as we do. It can be misleading to lump them all together and imagine that they all felt the same way.
Absolutely. And the benign interpretations of slavery bled over into interpretations of post-Civil War history so, giving us historians like those of the Dunning school, who argued that Reconstruction and the growth black political and civil rights rights in the decade or so after the war were basically a disaster, and that the re-establishment of a system of racial inequality during the Jim Crow era was the necessary and proper response to the excesses of abolitionism and Radical Republicanism.
Plenty of northern historians went along with the image of slavery as a benign institution. I’ve quoted this before on the boards, but I think it’s worth putting it here too. This is a paragraph about slaves and slavery from one of the best-selling US history textbooks of the twentieth century:
This was a book first published in 1930, and written by two prominent and highly-respected Northern liberal historians, one from Harvard and one from Columbia University. The quote is from the 1942 edition. This paragraph appears in almost identical form in the 1950 edition, except that the work “darky” in the last sentence had been replaced by the word “black.”
By the 1962 edition, Morison and Commager’s interpretation was much more nuanced, and much more cognizant of the brutality of slavery. Even more changes were made in later editions.
Countless slave rebellions were sabotaged by snitching slaves–likely many of them house slaves.
I think some of that can be attributed to affection. But I think fear and self-preservation are mostly to blame. Massa might be cruel man, but at least he’s the devil you know. A slaveowner who is killed during a slave rebellion might be replaced with a worse slaveowner. And running away was not a realistic option for everyone (if you were a mother raising children, you weren’t going to be in the position to run away).
I can also imagine snitchers snitching because they thought doing so would curry favor. Being known as a “good nigger” had its perks.
Not only that, but plenty of slaves knew that any attempt at uprising, even if they weren’t involved personally, could lead to dire consequences. White’s often exacted revenge for rebellion or resistance that went far beyond the actual perpetrators. Nat Turner’s revolt in Virginia led to the killings of dozens of blacks without a trial in Southampton County, and in other areas of southern Virginia and northern North Carolina, there were violent reprisals by the white population against slaves and free blacks who had nothing at all to do with the revolt.
I didn’t think of it from that point of view, but that seems reasonable to me. I know Malcolm X had his opinion on the differences between house and field slaves, but I wonder if being a house slave might have been more stressful. Oh, the work for a house slave was likely easier than being in the cotton or tobacco fields. But with working in such close constant proximity to whites, I can’t imagine the house slave had many opportunities to lower their guard.
The work of a house slave wasn’t necessarily easier than the field slaves. It came with better clothing and housing, they endured hardships field slaves didn’t have. For one thing, house slaves were often victimized by Missy, and the abuse often came from a place of boiling resentment rather than simple power-tripping. The woman of the house on a typical plantation was a mere figurehead; the real accomplishments came from the slaves. The slaves, not Missy, were the ones who prepared the delicious feasts that were the talk of the town. It was Mammy who the little kids rushed to for comforting, not Missy. And of course, frequently house slaves would have children that bore a strong resemblance to Massa–and to protect her ego, Missy would have to pretend that it was just a coincidence. But a person can only pretend so much. So she would unload all of her jealousy and resentment on the slaves. For another thing, house slaves worked around the clock because there were always slop jars that needed emptying and babies in need of nursing and fires in need of tending and hot air in need of circulating. Slaves would often have to sleep on the floor right outside of the bedroom (or even within the bedroom) of whomever they were assigned to. So while they had better housing accommodations, they were only marginally better. At least field slaves got to socialize with each other at the end of the day and let their hair down. House slaves didn’t have this.
I think this is a good point and goes to why trying to rank slaves’ conditions based on the type of work they did is an oversimplistic exercise that blots out the psychology of the people affected. Not everyone’s goal is to do as little physical labor as possible, and the internal life of a slave should be considered as part of the horror of the practice. For some other examples:
Harvesting sugar is generally considered to be the most difficult of the major slave-based industries in the Western Hemisphere (the hierarchy is usually given as something like housework, factory work, coffee, tobacco, cotton, sugar)…but the sugar colonies of the Carribean ended slavery well before the rest of the Atlantic World did. Being a sugar laborer in 1850 was way better than being a coffee or cotton laborer, because the sugar industry no longer used slaves in 1850 (outside of the small part of Brazil that hadn’t switched to coffee). Most people would rather do hard work as a free employee than easier work as a slave.
Factory work could involve being protected from the outdoor elements and being viewed as somewhat less disposable than a farm laborer since it required some skill … yet, the coming of the Industrial Revolution to the U.S., along with the cotton gin, extended the economic viability of slavery for generations past when it might have died out. If it weren’t for that nail factory at Monticello, Jefferson might have become an abolitionist. Is it “easy” to go through the day knowing that your ability to make metal goods is part of the reason slavery still exists at all? Not for thinking people. And we tend to ignore this aspect of the system.
From my reading, another big difference was town vs rural. Slaves in town (even pretty small communities) had significant advantages: opportunities to earn extra money, better housing and food, access to information about the world. But they also had a lot more contact with the white world, which meant they were more vulnerable to targeted abuse and whimsy. The biggest difference, though was that while no slaves had legal protections of any value, slaves in town could and did benefit from social pressure on whites to not be sociopathic monsters. Obviously, there was a level of horrific abuse that was considered acceptable, but there were limits. Appearances did matter, and slaves who had become fixtures in the larger community could have quite a bit of protection. There are white slaveowners who hid runaways slaves not because they disapproved of slavery as an institution but because they disapproved of a particular instance of extreme cruelty. Out in the country, however, total sociopaths had free rein.
Definitely. You see this in narratives by former slaves like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Here’s Douglass:
And Jacobs, after describing her efforts to avoid the sexual advances of her owner Dr. Flint:
My students read sections from these narratives, and one of the questions I ask them to write about is the different factors that could shape the slave experience. Location was clearly one of those factors.
I teach Jacobs on my unit about gender roles. They way she shapes her narrative around the ideals of Republican Motherhood and uses it both to help her audience identify with her, as being somehow essentially middle class in her values if not her legal status, and to distance them from their white analoges in the South, really works well with bright HS kids. Like, I get great papers.
What do you know about slave theft? George Washington Carver and his mother were stolen and the Carvers sent a former slave thief to find them. he only returned with young George whom the Carvers raised as an adopted son.
This is just speculation on my part but I feel the house slaves faced more psychological suffering than field slaves did.
Working in a field in the early nineteenth century was hard physical labor. But it was essentially the same kind of hard physical labor that lots of free people were performing at the same time (although unlike slaves, they got to keep the rewards of their labor). And a slave working in a field was working around other slaves in the same situation.
House slaves may have been in a more comfortable physical setting. But they were constantly seeing the difference in their status and the status of their owners and being reminded of their enslavement in a way that field slaves were not.