Picture Freedom. Jasmine Nichole Cobb
the Black body’s inherent ability to evade observation and its ability to deceive even the most astute White observer.
This condition of hypervisibility depended upon the suppression of a Black gaze. Although slavery constructed the Black body as deceptive, the matrix also construed unfree Black people as devoid of the ability to properly see, prefiguring them as visible objects that lacked the ability to consciously manipulate notions of visuality. The matrix of slavery’s peculiar visual culture meant to suppress the Black eye/I. In the daily practice of slavery, many Whites failed to recognize that enslaved Black people engaged in processes of observation, or that they monitored Whites’ behaviors. Likewise, the system of slavery failed to entertain the existence of an inner Black subject, with a sense of will, who realized her own mistreatment or violation.20 These social beliefs appear in records of unfree Black house servants who listened in on White people’s conversations.21 In this rubric, slavery’s atrocities happened to individuals who were supposedly unable to critically observe acts of sexual assault and kidnapping. When Whites did not presume that Black people were unable to cast a critical eye on the system of slavery, they demanded that unfree people look away. For example, if a bonded man or woman delivered the wrong kind of “look” toward a free White, such an offense was deemed disrespectful to the individual and to slavery’s power relations—a punishable crime in the state of Virginia.22 Whites socially mandated that people of African descent avoid issuing looks in service of the maintenance of slavery.
Accordingly, slavery’s peculiarly unreliable visual culture entailed a number of inconsistencies that helped maintain constant distinctions of race. African descendants could not avoid visibility, but the law required that they make themselves visible to White sight. Similarly, unfree Blacks inherently lacked any kind of critical perception, but the law forbade them from looking at Whites. The peculiar nature of visual culture in the context of slavery mimicked the strange nature of ocularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the presence of transatlantic slavery, “a deep belief in knowing by seeing” emerged as “key” to race relations.23 Cartesian dualism lent visual credence to its power structures, producing an unrelenting faith in the “disembodied eye” in popular culture as well as within intellectual discourses. Whereas within this “ontology of sight,” as described by Martin Jay, “the one who casts the look is always a subject and the one who is its target is always turned into an object,” ocularity within the context of the Enlightenment easily attached itself to philosophies of race and enslavement.24 The subjective “I” found its underpinning in the Cartesian “eye,” and thus the racialization of subjectivity also enlisted the visual. To put it differently, early ruminations on the eye/I always already trafficked in conceptions of race. Enlightenment theories of the visual were imbedded within the proliferation of slavery. The eye as dissociated from corporeality accommodated a larger context that severed Whiteness from the body. Similarly, emphasis on the utility value of the Black body or Blackness as pure embodiment rendered persons of African descent as devoid of ocular faculties. The construction of ocularity in the period of Enlightenment established the ability to see, or the state of being visual, as connected to raciality. Bodies prefigured as visible, and thus racialized, necessarily remained distant from any practices of looking. Slavery united the racial and the visual through everyday practices. These philosophical ruminations on the eye, perspective, and corporeality (as associated with Descartes) are not severed from the practices of slavery that they helped to facilitate. These racial distinctions within the visual neatly connected to the Cartesian notion of subjectivity, problematically parsing the individual into mind or body, eye or embodiment.
Although a number of laws and social practices emphasized the significance of the Black body and unfree Black people to the system of slavery, notions of the White eye were also fundamental to the inconsistent nature of this peculiar institution. Acts such as locating Africans for kidnapping and identifying individuals who were “strong” enough to withstand the Middle Passage constructed slavers as gifted in assessing bodies for subjugation. Particularly when it came to purchasing chattel, slavery demanded an expert White eye/I to examine the bodies of potential purchases. Yet, while it took a certain innate visual skill to choose people of African descent who were good investments, slavery’s marketplace actively existed as a place of illusions where Whites oiled unfree people to make them appear strong, fed Blacks enough to make them look healthy, and prodded them to seem joyous. Walter Johnson explains that “being a ‘good judge of slaves’” was an important attribute for southern White men, making “the inspection and evaluation of black slaves” a central part of social hierarchy and one’s “public identity.”25 The “White man’s” ability to “see” enslaved people was a notable skill, even as Johnson notes that Whites in charge of trading took care to physically alter Black bodies for sale, shaving beards, dying hair, feeding them fatty diets, and forcing them to dance.26 In the transactions of slavery, the Black body represented the terrain on which Whites attempted to trick other Whites, or to demonstrate their own expertise. The White eye/I could simultaneously exist as expert at the slave market, and as one who suffered deception there as well.
The investiture of Whiteness with exceptional visual abilities is one of slavery’s most peculiar offerings. The cultivation of Whiteness through the faculties of the eye represents a key element of slavery’s visual domination. Although “slavery operated behind a certain invisibility, as far as its European beneficiaries were concerned,” where European colonists could avoid visual encounters with enslaved peoples and colonized territories geographically removed from the empire, slavery also helped to render Whiteness invisible by diminishing the specificity of the White body.27 The establishment of “White” as a racial group happened through a number of processes in the U.S. context, and slavery’s visual culture was one of them. Matthew Frye Jacobson describes the “making” of “Caucasians,” where the cultivation of White raciality “is not merely [about] how races are comprehended, but how they are seen.” Jacobson exposes the intertwining of citizenship with Whiteness in the nation’s founding documents, simultaneous to questions of immigration, naturalization, and the abolition of slavery.28 Connecting Whites and citizenship made ascending to Whiteness a politically salient project for immigrants. Over time, White bodies became unmarked by race as the “possessive investment in whiteness,” from the colonial period onward, happened through the articulation of non-Whiteness, through emphasis on the specificity of Native, African, Asian, and Mexican American bodies.29 The importance of distinction helped to obscure White raciality by rendering Whiteness as an achievement, by making “White” a thing of racial ascendance for European ethnic immigrants trying to assimilate. To be recognized as White was to be recognized in relation to both Black and White servitude. Of the vast number of unskilled Europeans who immigrated to the colonial United States, one-half to two-thirds of them sold themselves into indentured service for five to seven years, facing hardships similar to slavery on a day-to-day basis, notwithstanding the “length of bondage and the involuntary and hereditary nature of slavery” as a unique and unfortunate distinction for African descendants.30 White servants in the colonial United States often identified as English, Scots, Irish, and German immigrants, and they also ran away from servitude because of brutal punishment. The appearance of “white” skin helped many indentured servants escape, although, at times, Celtic accents or tattered clothing gave them away, leading to their recapture.31 Nonetheless, these instances reveal how tracking down Whites to reinstitute their servitude required attending to multiple characteristics besides the appearance of the body. So while some would-be Whites could not instantly lay claim to slavery’s organization of White invisibility, the ability to call on the privileges of Whiteness in social interaction and, more importantly, the ability to be seen as other than a “slave” brought some degree of leverage for European immigrants that people of African descent were not afforded. A White “convict servant maid, named SARAH WILSON” ran away from her master and changed her name to “lady Susanna Carolina Matilda,” which she offered to make “the public believe that she was his Majesty’s sister.” Along with the name change, Sarah/Susanna made her clothes “with a Crown and a B” to support her story.32 Sarah/Susanna could move into another kind of visibility in the context of the colonial United States, transitioning from the object of surveillance to presenting herself as fit for observing others.
The remarkable White runaway Benjamin Franklin provides another useful example of how some indentured servants could utilize