53 pages • 1 hour read
Saidiya V. HartmanScenes of Subjection
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapter 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Subject of Freedom”
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “Instinct and Injury: The Just and Perfect Inequality of the Color Line”
Hartman examines Congressional discussions surrounding the postbellum amendments to the Constitution and civil rights legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, and the Fourteenth Amendment. In this examination she pays attention to the powerful discourse of “equality” and teases out tensions within this discourse.
For example, while the Fourteenth Amendment and Civil Rights Act of 1875 provided equal legal protections, both Congress and the Supreme Court did not see an intrinsic tension between equal protection and discrimination. Debate instead focused on the kind of discrimination occurring rather than the fact of discrimination.
The rhetoric of impossible responsibility that helped to create burdened individuality for freed people, as discussed in Chapter 5, was articulated in Congressional discussions concerned with both Black equality (via civil rights) and racialized difference. Many advocated Black responsibility within a narrative of Black “self-making,” which newly conferred rights supposedly enabled. Now fully legal subjects, it was argued, emancipated people had nothing to complain about and had full agency to create their own lives. Hartman draws attention to another tension here—that between this approach to legal equality and the “redress” that enslaved people had sought in their everyday practice. Redress, though seeking relief, was simultaneously always embedded in an acknowledgment of ongoing loss. By contrast, the rhetoric of the self-made rights-bearing freed person was focused on a future completely “new” and removed from any continuity with the past and its ongoing pressures.
Equality, in the context of equally distributed civil rights, then, theoretically provided a clean break from enslavement: White and Black men were in possession of the same rights. Therefore, many unfairly assumed an equal possession of liberty. According to Hartman, rather than addressing the violent legacy of slavery, the invocation of equal rights moved attention away from the work that needed to be done to start to actualize true liberty. Instead, equality was imagined and legislated by way of “treatment” and not “legislative actualization.” The same treatment, it was argued, was tantamount to the same liberty, regardless of slavery and racism. Civil rights, rather than the first step of many needed to create a just society, was viewed as the beginning and the end.
Others, however, did consider this “equality” in the context of lived differences between Black and white people. Yet this consideration was also problematic because the recognition of racialized difference, when packaged within legal equality, enabled a notion of difference that was thought to be legally neutral. Grounded in an overwhelming confidence in the power of civil rights, difference within equality evolved into the “separate but equal” policy of racial segregation.
Rather than addressing the injustices that created this “difference,” then, the discourse of civil rights cushioned the extreme harms of slavery and its legacy for Black people, facilitating segregation. Faith in civil rights helped to create the burden of postbellum Black existence: Responsibility for lived inequality was placed on individual Black people, who, because they were now considered to have full and equal rights under the law, had no “excuse.” Moreover, any claims to unjust difference would be squelched by a policy of “separate but equal.”
Discussions of equality and difference not only assumed individualistic self-making but assumed this making within the context of masculinity. The “equality” articulated in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 provided for the same civil rights for Black citizens as white citizens. In doing so, however, freed women’s rights were denied, and all women continued to be legally subjugated. “Equality” in the context of gender, as in the context of slavery, was not an equality that denied the past or claimed to break from the past at all; instead, women of all races continued to be denied the rights of men. Since women were not considered “equal” to men, they were considered irrelevant to discussions regarding the equality of men.
While “anti-miscegenation” laws (laws forbidding interracial sexual relationships and marriage) had been present since the colonial era, anxiety regarding inter-racial sexual relations increased after emancipation. In her analysis, Hartman first discusses interracial relationships during slavery, noting that sexual relations that were reproductive extended the enslaver’s power. In this sense, interracial sex was not seen as interracial sex, as it occurred within white mastery, extended white mastery, and reproduced white mastery. As with abolitionist empathy, whiteness was all-consuming of Blackness. After emancipation, however, interracial sex could not signify white mastery in the same way. Instead, threats to whiteness were imagined in the “contamination” of whiteness via Blackness. Governmental organizations like the Freedmen’s Bureau reflected these fears of sexual and social mingling and white “contamination.” Though their programs provided food and other crucial goods to freed people, their educational materials aimed to cultivate domestic purity by way of racialized “hygiene” that entailed segregation.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Analysis
Emancipation and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, in particular, are generally seen as crucially progressive legislation, providing for the legal end of slavery and the legal conferral of human rights to former enslaved persons. While it is true that the Fourteenth Amendment and the civil rights legislation that occurs in its wake articulated the full legal subjectivity that slavery denied (and weaponized), Hartman is interested in the cultural thinking that occurs in the context of these rights and their naïve promises of equality. Ultimately, Hartman is interested in examining how The “Burdened Individuality” of Emancipation mirrors The Weaponization of the Legal Subjectivity of Enslaved People, meaning that progress in the legal recognition of Black people is not unequivocally positive.
Hartman’s critique of what she considers an overly simplistic narrative of legislative progress also constitutes a critique of liberal humanism altogether. Within a liberal humanist framework, equal rights create equal ground on which to live. Thus, each person, with the same rights, is expected to be responsible for themselves and also toward others, creating a civil society. Yet, as Hartman argues throughout the book, such a liberal humanist framework is not helpful in thinking about enslaved experience and, in fact, leads scholars down the wrong path. Notions such as “consent” and “personhood” are not useful in understanding the experiences of enslaved people, as slavery denies personhood, and sexual consent, for example, can never truly be given when someone is denied their very personhood without their consent. Hartman’s underlying critique of liberal humanism, then, is that the abstract confirmation of equal rights elides and erases the concrete and material inequalities that characterize postbellum American society.
Chapter 6 continues this interrogation of some of liberal humanism’s most cherished concepts, then, in its analysis of the assumption of “equality” that comes with the bestowal of postbellum civil rights. This assumption reflects the enormous power assumed to lie in legal rights within Western liberal humanism, both in the 19th century and today. It was assumed by many well-intentioned people that legal rights themselves would organically transform society and, as “property” of the individual, would ensure the chance for the individual to transform themself, if that chance was simply taken.
The abstract idea of legal equality often trumped the reality of lived inequality, which remained extremely violent for Black people despite these rights and, sometimes, because of these rights. These rights were believed by many liberals to be a “solution” in and of themselves, which squelched the more radical action that was needed. Lived racial differences, which were the result of racism, were left to be passively sorted out by this “solution” of civil rights, as if justice would organically occur out of this legislation. Yet the violent difference in lived reality was not ameliorated or addressed by civil rights, which soon facilitated, in the rhetoric of equality, the requirement of difference in the policy of “separate but equal” that came with Plessy v Ferguson (1896).
Anti-miscegenation laws, too, similarly anticipate “separate but equal” legislation. Sexual relations, by definition, required at least two parties, and thus required both parties to be subject to the law, which punished each “equally.” Yet the lived reality of this was anything but equal. These laws disproportionately harmed Black people, who were often tortured for any sexual contact with whites, whether real or rumored.
Rather than actively work to create a society of differences that were grounded in equality, the notion of equality, like subjectivity, was weaponized, ensuring that segregation would codify spaces of inequality.
