The Moonspeaker:
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Exploiters' Tactics (2024-01-15)

Photograph of Frederick Douglass from the frontispiece of his 1855 book, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1855), via the internet archive.

I have read many brief mentions of Frederick Douglass, who won his freedom and literacy to become one of the great african american speakers and writers of the nineteenth century. Reproduced here is a copy of a rarely featured picture from his 1855 book, My Bondage and My Freedom. It seems not wholly accidental that mainstream citations lean more towards showing him in his older age, as opposed to a picture like this one. Considering that the preponderance of citations of Douglass online and off that I have encountered are by united states-based non-african american writers, perhaps this should not be surprising. Even less surprising is how rarely I happen on lengthy excerpts from Douglass' keen analysis of politics and economics in his time, except at the wonderful site Black Agenda Report founded by the late Glenn Ford and now led by Margaret Kimberley. The following quote is one of many excellent citations of african americans in The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Inustry by Ned and Constance Sublette. It is much easier to trace nineteenth citations now to the original texts through the internet archive.

As the times continue to be the wrong sort of interesting and the appearance of stability of the parasitic capitalist system collapses, the need for us all to understand the tactics applied by oppressors to keep the rest of us down grows ever greater. We ignore the hard won knowledge of our predecessors at our peril. Just because officially chattel slavery is not supposed to exist anymore, or the analysis in a given book or other source is more than a hundred years old, that does not in itself make it irrelevant. After all, no such age cut off is applied to the documents and sources convenient to power, such as various works by ancient greeks and romans, or such italian writers as Machiavelli or Bocaccio, who lived in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries, respectively. We should always turn right around and look up who we are told not to read at all, let alone carefully, especially if we have any reason to think the point is to prevent us questioning the status quo. In that case we are rarely ill-served by reading whatever we are not "supposed" to. Merely reading something is not going to change our minds if it does not say anything relevant to what we are experiencing. If whatever the source is is truly irrelevant, it will strike us as such when we read it. But enough preamble, let us turn to Douglass and his incisive commentary on how slaveholders turned white labourers against slaves.

The circumstance which led to [Master Hugh] taking me away, was a brutal outrage, committed upon me by the white apprentices of the ship-yard. The fight was a desperate one, and I came out of it most shockingly mangled. I was cut and bruised in sundry places, and my left eye was nearly knocked out of its socket. The facts, leading to this barbarous outrage upon me, illustrate a phase of slavery destined to become an important element in the overthrow of the slave system, and I may, therefore state them with some minuteness. That phase is this: the conflict of slavery with the interests of the white mechanics and laborers of the south. In the country, this conflict is not so apparent; but, in cities, such as Baltimore, Richmond, New Orleans, Mobile, &c., it is seen pretty clearly. The slaveholders, with a craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging the enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the blacks, succeeds in making the said white man almost as much a slave as the black slave himself. The difference between the white slave, and the black slave, is this: the latter belongs to one slaveholder, and the former belongs to all the slaveholders, collectively. The white slave has taken from him, by indirection, what the black slave has taken from him, directly, and without ceremony. Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers. The slave is robbed, by his master, of all his earnings, above what is required for his bare physical necessities; and the white man is robbed by the slave system, of the just results of his labor, because he is flung into competition with a class of laborers who work without wages. The competition, and its injurious consequences, will, one day, array the non-slaveholding white people of the slave states, against the slave system, and make them the most effective workers against the great evil. At present, the slaveholders blind them to this competition, by keeping alive their prejudice against the slaves, as men – not against them as slaves. They appeal to their pride, often denouncing emancipation, as tending to place the white working man, on an equality with negroes, and, by this means, they succeed in drawing off the minds of the poor whites from the real fact, that, by the rich slave-master, they are already regarded as but a single remove from equality with the slave. The impression is cunningly made, that slavery is the only power that can prevent the laboring white man from falling to the level of the slave's poverty and degradation. To make this enmity deep and broad, between the slave and the poor white man, the latter is allowed to abuse and whip the former, without hinderance. But – as I have suggested – this state of facts prevails mostly in the country. In the city of Baltimore, there are not unfrequent murmurs, that educating the slaves to be mechanics may, in the end, give slave-masters power to dispense with the services of the poor white man altogether. But, with characteristic dread of offending the slaveholders, these poor, white mechanics in Mr. Gardiner's ship-yard – instead of applying the natural, honest remedy for the apprehended evil, and objecting at once to work there by the side of slaves – made a cowardly attack upon the free colored mechanics, saying they were eating the bread which should be eaten by American freemen, and swearing that they would not work with them. The feeling was, really, against having their labor brought into competition with that of the colored people at all ; but it was too much to strike directly at the interest of the slaveholders; and, therefore – proving their servility and cowardice – they dealt their blows on the poor, colored freeman, and aimed to prevent him from serving himself, in the evening of life, with the trade with which he had served his master, during the more vigorous portion of his days. Had they succeeded in driving the black freemen out of the ship yard, they would have determined also upon the removal of the black slaves. The feeling was very bitter toward all colored people in Baltimore, about this time (1836), and they – free and slave – suffered all manner of insult and wrong.

– From Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, pages 309-311

This tactic is still in use to this day, and we should all be on guard at the hint of this among all too many divide and conquer techniques. Their vicious effectiveness as always depends upon a highly tempting piece of bait that can be especially difficult to resist when others who have taken it pressure those who resist it to go along with them. The ones who took the bait are understandably embarrassed, and exploiters depend on this embarrassment to act as a further enforcement mechanism. That is, they depend on those who took the bait to blame the ones who didn't for their embarrassment, even though if anyone is responsible for it, it is truly the men exploiting them. But they have often also been convinced that they can't do anything to hold the exploiter to account without excessive risk to themselves, so they go after their resistant peers and thereby do the exploiters' work for them. Few tactics are crueller than this one.

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