Orlando Patterson Quotes

If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting whites, as well as civil society's junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today - even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement - invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually anti-Black, meaning it will not dance with death.

Religion explains how it is possible to relate to the dead who still live. It says little about how ordinary people should relate to the living who are dead.

As the historical sociologist Orlando Patterson once remarked, “The slave variant of capitalism is merely capitalism with its clothes off.”45

More than thirty years ago, Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, a black Democrat, said, “The sociological truths are that America, while still flawed in its race relations… is now the least racist white-majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protection of minorities than any other society, white or black; offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including all those of Africa.

Who were the first persons to get the unusual idea that being free was not only a value to be cherished but the most important thing that someone could possess? The answer, in a word: slaves. Freedom began its career as a social value in the desperate yearning of the slave to negate what, for him or her, and for nonslaves, was a peculiarly inhuman condition. —Orlando Patterson, Freedom

When Professor Orlando Patterson of Harvard University was interviewed on NewsHour with Jim Lehrer regarding President Bill Clinton’s perjury, he said, “I think it’s important to emphasize the fact that there are no absolutes in our moral precepts. Kant may have believed that, and some fascists do. . . . [P]erjury is not an absolute.

Indeed, the classic situation of the slave is that of the ‘socially dead person.’ But if religion, in the form of ancestor worship, ‘explains how it is possible to relate to the dead who still live,’ how, asks the sociologist Orlando Patterson, ought society to ‘relate to the living who are dead,’ that is to say, to the socially dead? Patterson has insisted that the social death imposed by slavery entails a process involving the two contradictory principles of marginality and integration. Thus, the slave, like the ancestor, is a ‘liminal’ being, one who is in society but cannot ever be fully of society. ‘In his social death,’ Patterson asserts, ‘the slave . . . lives on the margin between community and chaos, life and death, the sacred and the secular.’ Patterson suggests, moreover, that in many slaveholding societies the social death of the slave functioned precisely to empower him to navigate, in his liminality, through betwixt-and-between places where full members of society could not. In some societies, the liminal status of the slave empowered him to undertake roles in the spiritual world, such as handling the bodies of the deceased, that were dangerous to full members of society. ‘Being socially dead, the captives were able to move between the living and the dead without suffering the supernatural harm inevitably experienced by the socially alive in such boundary crossing.’ Among precolonial African societies, Patterson has observed, ritual practices associated with enslavement also worked to ‘give symbolic expression to the slave’s social death and new status.

To be cut off from family for years -- to be too far away for regular visits. To watch so many of your closest relationships fray and then dissolve. To see your children grow up through family pictures. To be hungry for days at a time because the food you eat is never enough, and there is nothing you can do about it. To be isolated. To be in a place with thousands of men but to somehow feel alone. This is what it means to be socially dead. To be subected to violence and humiliation. To be shackled, one to another, during daily routines, your ability to work and provide for yourself taken away. To move in a coffle down long hallways like animals for 'feeding time' of 'meds.' To be marched away from your lover and your children every time visitation ends. To be cut off from the human community or to have no community at all -- at least, no community that might be valued by members of a free society. To have few benefits and fewer protections. To become a figure who walks the yard or haunts the neighborhood so many years after your release, unable to find work or secure a home, unable to participate in the politics of the city in the ways most people find meaningful. To have no say over where or how often you connect with people you love. To be made a 'nonperson,' in the words of sociologist Orlando Patterson, who gave us the term 'social death.' To be at once part of the wider world, through labor or punishment or as a social problem of national concern, yet to be kept just outside of it.

enslaved person is given a new name and a new identity as a whore.”19 A nine-country study by a team of clinical psychologists headed by Melissa Farley found that 68 percent of sex slaves suffered symptoms of post–traumatic stress disorder. The study concluded that, “existing in a state of social death, the prostitute is an outsider who is seen as having no honor or public worth. Those in prostitution, like slaves and concentration camp prisoners, may lose their identities as individuals, becoming primarily what masters, Nazis or customers want them to be.”20

institution but the embarrassing institution.

children. “These people—the coloreds—had a lot of status,” the Jamaican sociologist Orlando Patterson says. “By eighteen twenty-six, they had full civil liberties. In fact, they achieve full civil liberties at the same time as the Jews do in Jamaica. They could vote. Do anything a white person could do—and this is within the

In light of such fatal uncertainties all relations were precarious, provisional, and tenuous; all community verged on the chaos that could rain down at any time from the deus ex machina of the slaveholder’s economic calculations or personal whim. The tragedy of trust under social death has been the most underestimated impact of slavery and the one that perhaps has had the longest afterlife beyond the legal abolition of the institution.

civilisation. But I realise that loss of faith in people is more devastating than loss of faith in God.

Finally, there is the group of mainly humanist intellectuals who constitute a movement known as Afropessimism.63 Reacting against the Pollyannaish postracial rhetoric at the turn of the century, they insist not just on the persistence of racism in America, but on the fact that race remains the critical divide in the nation, the living lineaments of slavery whose “afterlife” continues to define black Americans as socially dead, permanently excluded from the taken-for-granted civic culture and social life of white-defined America.

: blacks are now incorporated and play major roles in its mainstream culture, national political life, and military, the election of Barack Obama to the presidency being only the culmination of this top-down process of disalienation. However, at the local, personal, and institutional levels, I believe that the lineaments of the culture of slavery still haunt African-American life in important ways, especially among the disconnected young people and working poor in its ghettos, prisons, and rural poverty belts, its influence perpetuated through both white racism, institutional and personal, and the slavery-generated, self-destructive tragedy of fragile institutions and fraught gender relations, themselves reinforced by postindustrial economic evisceration.70

once a year, as the cliometricians, those sharp-eyed accountants of social death, love to calculate. The fact of its possibility was experienced as an ever-present sense of impending doom that shadowed everything, every thought, every moment of her existence. This is the essence of natal alienation, which, in addition to its crushing psychological impact for every individual slave, also entailed their inability as a group to “freely integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives, to inform their understanding of social reality with the inherited meanings of their natural forebears, or to anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory.

WHITEWASHING HISTORY “Whoa!” you might say. “We’ve never heard this story about the Democrats. Are you making this stuff up?” Actually, no. Nothing I write in this chapter is controversial in terms of whether it happened or not. I am relying on the mainstream historians of slavery: David Brion Davis, Kenneth Stampp, Eugene Genovese, Orlando Patterson. How, then, can my arguments sound so outrageous? The reason is that progressive Democrats have whitewashed the party’s history. They have cleaned up the record.

A Lasting Legacy I return to Elkins now, to make a summary point and a single closing observation. The summary point is that even as a closed system, slavery, simply because of its long duration, produced over time a distinctive African American culture. This is a point stressed in Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll and in his mostly sympathetic critique of Elkins. Slaves, for instance, developed a repertoire of songs and stories and relationships—sometimes lifelong relationships—that ultimately helped to form a black identity in the United States. There is no analog for this in the concentration camps, partly because of the nature of the camps and partly because they lasted for just a dozen years from 1933 to 1945. In general, camp prisoners did not form close relationships, partly because this was discouraged by the guards and partly because prisoners realized that the very person you befriended last week could be summarily executed this week. So the only behavioral changes that concentration camps produced were in the nature of short-term adaptations to camp life itself. It follows from this that the cultural legacy of slavery long outlasted slavery while the cultural legacy of the camps—including the peculiar disfigurations of personality that Elkins detected—proved to be a temporary phenomenon. The phenomena of the zombie-like Muselmanner, the ersatz Nazism of the Kapos—all of this is now gone. It makes no sense to say that Jews or eastern Europeans today display any of the characteristics that developed within that temporary closed system. With American blacks, however, the situation is quite different. Although slavery ended in 1865, it lasted more than 200 years, and it had its widest scope during the era of Democratic supremacy in the South from the 1820s through the 1860s. Many of the features of the old slave plantation—dilapidated housing, broken families, a high degree of violence required to keep the place together, a paucity of opportunity and advancement prospects, a widespread sense of nihilism and despair—are evident in Democrat-run inner cities like Oakland, Detroit, Baltimore, and Chicago. “There was a distinct underclass of slaves,” political scientist Orlando Patterson writes, “who lived fecklessly or dangerously. They were the incorrigible blacks of whom the slave-owner class was forever complaining. They ran away. They were idle. They were compulsive liars. They seemed immune to punishment.” And then comes Patterson’s punch line: “We can trace the underclass, as a persisting social phenomenon, to this group.” 39 The Left doesn’t like Patterson because he’s a black scholar of West Indian origin with a penchant for uttering politically incorrect truths.