This is an hour and 45 minutes. Eric foner i am eric foner from the columbia university, moderating this second session on slavery and freedom. I want to begin by thanking the organizers of this excellent conference. We all know how much work went into, you know, putting this whole thing together. So thanks to those at the museum , and the American Historical Association that have been so active in getting this conference organized. Two weeks ago, i gave my last class at columbia university. I am now riding off into the sunset [applause] eric foner of retirement. And so i ask if you will indulge me for just a minute as i reflect briefly on my own experience in relation to this field of African American history. Which is a little, it is sort of emblematic of the many things that have happened the last couple of generations. I grew up in a family in which africanAmerican History, although utterly ignored in the School Education that i got in grade school and high school, nonetheless, the black experience was considered, in my family, central to American History. Paul robeson and web dubois were talked about. Friends of my family. I have a photo sitting on Paul Robesons shoulders. At age two, it was a very long way up. He was a big guy. And my uncle philip foner was prolific in the field of African American history. My father jack foner, also it a historian, published a book on the black military experience. Like clay carson who mentioned this last night, i took part on the march on washington 1963, but i older than he is, so i took part in the much less wellknown march on washington of 1957, not a wellknown part of our history. As an undergraduate at columbia, i was lucky enough to take my first history course with the legendary teacher james p. Sinson, who assigned dubois black reconstruction and america , even though the chairman told him that was not done at an ivy league institution. In 1969, i taught the first course in africanAmerican History ever given in the over 200 year history of columbia university, so the field was just beginning to get going outside of the black universities where it had always existed, of course. Among the students in my classes over the years whom i am very proud were eric holder, former attorney general. I gave him a b. [applause] [laughter] eric foner i think that was sort of a respectable grade back then. I think president obama recently issued an executive order raising that grade to an a. [laughter] and among my students, former students here at the conference are rita roberts and Stephanie Smallwood who are blogging away at this moment, i think. By who we saw in action last night, and it wont surprise you that when she was an undergraduate, she kind of split her time between excellent historical work and organizing to get columbia to divest its holdings in companies that were connected with south africa, so she was a Student Activist from the very beginning. And leslie harris, who was also in our program, was one of our students. And i chaired the Committee Later on that established the institute for research in africanamerican studies at columbia and hired as it were as our first director the late and much lamented manning marable. All of this to say is why i really want to tip my hat to bonnie bunch and his coworkers, because this museum that is going to open soon is really a dream come true for all of us who have labored in this venue of africanAmerican History for a long, long time. So thank you lonnie and those working with you. [applause] eric foner so now that the first panel has answered the question who is black america, this panel has to decide what the narrative paradigm is that best structures africanAmerican History. As you all know, one of the most influential works in this area in the 20th century was john hope franklins textbook from slavery to freedom. That is a simple, compelling idea from slavery to freedom. It suggests that emancipation is the pivot of the black experience, and perhaps of the whole american experience. There was also an alternative textbook out there, which many of you are familiar with, by meyer and brodrick, from plantation to ghetto. That suggests a somewhat more downbeat kind of history, right, one form of exploitation succeeded by another form of exploitation. But i think it is fair to say the slavery to freedom narrative has been the predominant one, although under considerable challenge of lately in the Current Issue of the journal of southern history, carol imberton has an article in writing the free marriage of, a review essay narrative, a sort of review essay of recent books that challenge the celebratory account from slavery to freedom. Books like jim downs escape from freedom, more than freedom, stacy smiths freedom frontier about unfree labor in the west. So one of the things i hope the panel will enable us to discuss is if this familiar slavery to freedom paradigm still make sense as a way of understanding the trajectory of black history, and why is this moment, when people might want to feel celebratory we are coming to the end of the first africanamerican president , why so many historians are understanding the limitations of emancipation and its aftermath and celebrating the transition. What are the implications for understanding slavery and freedom trend toward globalizing American History and africanAmerican History, and also emphasizing connections between slavery and capitalism, which we will hear about shortly. When the interpretive focus becomes so broad, so abstract, how can historical actors be factored in to the story . What roles can slave resistors play in a story which is operating at a global level . And then there is the question of reconstruction and how we want to think about that period after slavery, should be viewed as an episode of american democracy as dubois saw it, should be seen as a southern event what happened to the american component, as we include the west and expand its timeframe . Does decentering the south take away from it . And how does emancipation exist in public consciousness, in movies, in memorials, in flags, and how should we commemorate it in historical museums . Anyway, these are all big questions. We have a panel of big thinkers who can look at them. Their biographies and photographs, some of the photographs are antiquated [laughter] eric foner in the booklet that we have, i will not repeat their bios. This is the order in which they will speak. Number one, Walter Johnson from harvard university. Number two, Brenda Stephenson from ucla. Unfortunately, brenda was stuck in berlin yesterday. Her plane was canceled, she is in the air as we speak, so i will read the remarks. Secondly, unfortunately. Third is Thavolia Glymph from duke, and then annette gordonreed. From the Harvard History department and law school. Each as theythem call it a fat 10 minutes. I turned the floor over to Walter Johnson. The floor over to Walter Johnson. [applause] Walter Johnson thank you to eric foner. Again, i dont have anything as dramatic as i was not raised on shouldersaised on the of paul robeson. I did however once meet eric foner. [laughter] Walter Johnson thank you to the sponsors and dana elliott. It has been and are to be here an honor to be here and to reacquaint myself and to meet so many people who are my heroes. I want to acknowledge particularly my advisor who was the first person who helped me think through the fact that if we are actually going to try to write africanAmerican History, we need to imagine we are going to reconstruct the very categories of historical analysis around the historical experience of africanamerican people, and that is an idea i think has been shared and expressed by a lot of the folks in this room. It was from mel paynter that i first learned that. I want to try today to do a little bit around the question of freedom, and to try to think through a notion of freedom and to figure out how it sort of i would say a foreshortened version of freedom has talked shaped the historiography of slavery. I will pick up the pace. Brenda said i actually get her time. [laughter] Walter Johnson i dont think eric got that one. I want to begin from a familiar statement. You can find this in one variety or another. The statement is that slavery dehumanized enslaved people. A lot of problems and paul i statement. Rom that want to do this briefly and stop saying im going to do it usually. I think part of the problem with that statement is that the institution of slavery is in almost infinite variety, the terrible and inhumane things human beings do to one another. To cast it as the opposite of what it is human beings do is to misunderstand the character of human being. I think there is an implication of permanence in the notion of dehumanization that is baleful. I think it is much more productive to think of the condition of enslaved humanity, what it means to be a human being under the conditions of slavery. I also think many of the terroristic and perverse notions of slaveholding are alive with pleasures of slaveholding relied upon the notion of a human victim. I think that there is a deep ethical problem in historians of the 20th and 21st centuries casting doubt on the humanity of past historical actors, and it does raise the question of who gets to say when these africanamerican people or human were human again. And finally the statement about our own perceived ethical distance from the perpetrators, our ability to cast them as in human and take that and attribute it as if it is a characteristic of the victims, the fact that they have been be humanized. Dehumanized. There is an essential difference between arguing someone acted inhumanely and arguing the effect of their action was to dehumanize the victim. Behind all of these slippages, i think there is an unacknowledged ethical premise. Im going to read you a quotation from i guess not so recent but very influential book on history. I read this book not because it is particularly obtuse, but it is emblematic of presumptions which frame a lot of work done on the issue of slavery and some of the work i have done on the history of slavery. Whether implicitly or explicitly recognized the independent will and volition of their slaves, they acknowledged the humanity of their bond people, extracting this admission was in fact a form of slavery assistance. Slave resistance. Because slaves verify opposed to dehumanization inherent in their status. Status. So, thats a powerful sentence that collapses three different things. It collapses the notion of humanity into the notion of resistance, right . People are human when they resist. That leaves aside, then, the question for instance of despair. What about enslaved despair . What about enslaved suicide . And correspondingly, we see we do not have histories of these things the way we should, with the exception of mel paynters soul murder and slavery. The other thing is it leaves out the possibility of enslaved flourishing, for reasons we can all understand the minute i say the words happy and slave together. Nevertheless, we have no history of laughter and slavery. We have a very, very thin history of love. There is a collapse of enslaved humanity into resistance, i. E. Into the terms of enslaved peoples relationship with slaveholder. Finally this collapsing of the notion of resistance into independent will and volition, the thing am going to focus on the most. There is a collapsing notion of resistance into a particular form of what i would call subjectivity. The notion of what a human being is, a person who makes independent decisions. That is a notion of human subjectivity i will note to would be utterly foreign to net turner nat turner. Turner does not think he is a person who has independent will and volition. He thinks he is the fingertip of gods providence. He acts on the notion of sacred duty rather than independence. I want to call that into question. Now the thing that i guess i want to confidently say is that that figure of freedom is the very finger of freedom that is freedomery figure of being promulgated all over the world by the european slaveholding powers as the notion of freedom. It is a notion of freedom, freedom based on the rights of citizens that is historically framed by the problem of slavery and empire. So what i am interested in trying to do in the slightly longer and more convoluted paper that ive posted is to try to rework our notions of justice and human rights in the light of human slavery. It is really to try to treat slavery as the central moral event of modernity, to try to retheorized justice and freedom from the perspective of slavery and really the perspective of the continent of africa. Doing so would allow require us to give a thorough going account of what sort of Institution Slavery was and what we think of the enduring ethical and historical relevance of slavery, which i will do in the remaining three minutes i have. [laughter] Walter Johnson following Cedric Robinson and web dubois, this is the dubois of reconstruction as and thedark water essay on white folk which if you have not read, you should. Listening to the rest of what i at least have to say. I want to try to think about slavery as a form of racial capitalism. I want to look at exploitation through capitalism and racial domination through negro phobia, through common sense as identical to one another in many ways. It would take a lot of work to actually substantiate for you the notion that when we say the word capitalism, we should always say the word slavery. They are not two different things. That is why i want to say venture capitalism, but i will give you a few examples of why i want us to try to push, to insist upon that racial capitalism, to insist upon an analysis of antiblackness alongside our analysis, inextricable from the analysis of capitalism. If you cannot use the word capitalism to describe the exportation for sale of 12 Million People across the atlantic ocean, i am not sure what usefulness the term has. It seems to me that is the first challenge to the history of capitalism that does not acknowledge slavery and its central aspect. But one can map what we take to be the capitalist economy of the 19th century, particularly great britain, the capitalist economy for those who want to define capitalism as if it was only something that happened in manchester. If you actually make a map of that economy, you recognize it is an agricultural economy that works on a yearly basis of advances. What happens, the cotton merchants in liverpool make credit advances to planters in louisiana. And those advances are made against the cotton crop. Sometimes the cotton crop comes in short, and in the advanced from liverpool to louisiana is not going to get paid off by the time it actually comes in. So then there is a debt, and that debt has to be collateralized. So there is the atlantic system of slavery, which everybody acknowledged in the 19th century to be the moment where capitalism dawned in the cotton mills in lancashire. So there are cotton mills and human beings. Slavery was capitalist. Enslaved people were the capital. The other form of collateral is land, and that is land that we could just kind of here relate to the paper that ty miles did this morning. Notably, that land is covered by the Supreme Court decision, macintosh of 1823, by colleague gordonreed could correct what im going to say, but this is a foundational case of United States property law. You go back to the origins, try to go back and figure out why is it we legally owned the things we owned. At the bottom of that, we see johnson versus macintosh. This is the case which says that native americans are not allowed to sell land to individual white settlers. All native American Land must be aggregated under the federal government. It was to be just a beaded through a capitalist land market to white southerners. So that puts the bare bottom for property relations in the United States, there is imperialism, racial difference, and capitalist mode of distribution. That is the foundation. So those are some of the pathways i would try to use to elucidate this notion of racial capitalism, which i can do more on the questions and elucidate it a bit better in the paper, in the paper that is posted on the website. What i what to do with the little bit of time and i have remaining is outline what i think the benefit of bringing slavery to the center of our question of what we call human rights or global claims of justice to understand slavery in this particular version of slavery i have just tried to outline as a central, moral event of modernity. First of all, it is the amount of the p of injustice from the standpoint of african america, native america, the global south and rather than the global north, not from europe. It makes europe a central problem rather than the site of the elaboration of notions of justice. Secondly, and this just goes to some of the questions earlier, it is focused on the question of extraction and distribution with areas of the world. It proposes a generalization of the account of the historical wrongs based on the experience of those in europes dark workingclass, which takes the experience of dark workingclass of the world and generalizes that as the experience we should use to characterize justice everywhere. It is historically deep. It analyzes and emphasizes ways of present distribution and production related to past patterns. It is in that way, i think, a powerful antidote to colorblind liberalism, right . You need to think about historical distribution, not simply contemporary distributions. Emphasis on slavery as an apparent somatic wrong goes to gender and sexuality, relating to natal alienation, the subjection of one group of people to the purposes of another were the core feature of the human wrongs of slavery. It brin