The history of humans enslaving other humans goes back thousands of years. The basis for this has varied: some have been enslaved after being captured in wars; others in a form of permanent indentured servitude because of debt; and still others in extreme versions of class or caste systems in which some people spent their lives in a condition of servitude to others because the relation of one group (we might call them peasants or serfs) to another (nobility or aristocracy) was one of being treated as property: that some humans owned other humans was a feature of a society or culture.
Enslaved Africans brought to the New World were not, however, simply humans owned by other humans. They were regarded as less than human, more a distinct species than a race. They were mostly employed as beasts of burden and were bought and sold like livestock.
In the British colonies of North America there developed exceptions to this treatment of enslaved Africans as less than human. A slave might serve as a household servant, a nanny, or a wet nurse. On a plantation a slave might be a foreman or overseer of other slaves, responsible for managing their labor and maximizing their output, a sort of surrogate master who might employ such tools of enforcement as the whip. Having such a relatively elevated status could mean a lower likelihood of being sold as chattel. A slaveholder might come to regard such a slave almost as a member of the family and decide to render the servitude impermanent by providing for the slave to be freed after many years, sometimes upon the death of the owner.
But these were exceptions to the rule of having a sub-human status. In general slaves continued to be bought and sold as beasts of burden. When they reproduced, offspring were viewed as the products of breeding farm animals. Little or no thought was given to the notion that an adult male, an adult female, and the children produced by their sexual intercourse constituted a family, and such thinking did not enter into decisions about selling them when doing so would permanently separate them.
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In the 1970s I attended an academically selective public high school that drew students from all over the city. There were black classmates I held in high esteem because they were intellectually gifted, or talented musicians, or accomplished athletes who led my school's teams to championships. A few I had the good fortune to get to know well, forming deep friendships.
When I was in college and spent a summer driving a taxi - my first blue collar job - I was exposed to - in fact immersed in - the society of white working class fellow employees.
In general the city in which I was born and raised was extremely segregated. Nearly all of Philadelphia's neighborhoods were overwhelmingly white or black, typically virtually 100% one way or the other. My cab-driving coworkers came primarily from a working class neighborhood that was 100% white.
While I was by no means unfamiliar with racism, the content of some conversations astonished me, because it was not until that summer that I understood how some Whites regarded Blacks as less than human, a distinct species, referring to them as "animals" or even "things," statements about them often dripping with contempt.
At the age of 18 I had no idea how to respond to this - and so I didn't, except internally, where my response was to be shocked, appalled, horrified. Perhaps I sensed that nothing I might say could influence such thinking. And I was certainly too timid to try. Although I didn't know it at the time, I was an enabler.
The city's political milieu was hardly encouraging. The mayor was Frank Rizzo, police commissioner turned law-and-order politician, an unabashed racist whose treatment of the residents of black neighborhoods was disgraceful. Few black officers were added to the force when he was commissioner, and his tenure as mayor was marked by incidents of racist brutality and oppression.
The Black Lives Matter movement was formed nearly seven years ago. Only gradually did I come to realize that the movement was truly needed. My initial reaction was, "Of course black lives matter." It was not clear to me what, exactly, was the point of this statement.
Gradually I realized that there was good reason for making the statement, through the name of the movement and its myriad actions. News reports of incidents told the same story again and again: city police departments, both leaders and rank-and-file officers, conducted themselves as though black lives do not matter. City government officials' responses to such incidents ranged from indifferent to ineffectual.
When Black Americans are subjected to police brutality, the consequences span a gamut of effects, from injury, both emotional and physical, to death. It is all unmistakably dehumanizing. Yet rather than taking away the humanity of its victims, it flatly denies their humanity's very existence.
Black lives matter. They do not matter more than the lives of other members of our society. Black lives do not matter more than "blue lives." Black lives do not matter to the exclusion of the importance of others' lives. This insistence that black lives matter matter is necessary because they are in constant danger in the USA in a way that others are not, the result of a long history of seeing Blacks as less than human. Indeed, "structural racism" and "institutional racism" are mere euphemisms for the attitude that Blacks are less than human.
The statement made by the name of the movement conveys one simple and important truth: Black Lives Matter, and all of what we countenance in American society that denies that statement's verity must stop.
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