Catastrophic History. Memory, Racial Slavery, and Repair

Anthony Bogues

In 1965, the African American writer James Baldwin noted that “the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it with us … history is literally present in all that we do.” (Baldwin 1998: 723). Baldwin was writing against a dominant current in which there was deep denial that anti-black racism in US society was embedded within the social system of historical racial slavery. The view at that time was that racism had not been a foundational element in the formation of the American republic, but was rather a residue of the nineteenth-century Southern system of segregation (Jim Crow). The US racial order that was generated by racial slavery was not eliminated by the American Revolution in 1776 or the American Civil War in the mid-nineteenth century. The latter only emancipated enslaved blacks but did not formally end institutional anti-black racism, while the revolution granted political equality only to white men. Women did not receive the vote until 1920, followed by Indigenous people in 1924. African Americans were not granted full voting rights until 1965. This means that America has only been a full voting democracy for 61 years

Historically, US anti-black racism emerged alongside the social system of racial slavery and the general European colonial project. It was an authoritarian social system. The African American thinker and writer W. E. B. Du Bois called it a system in which human beings were placed under the “arbitrary will” of another. The system operated through laws and customs. It was one in which the enslaved Africans were not considered human, were disposable bodies, and never part of civic society nor the body politic. They were the constitutive outside population, yet paradoxically also the fulcrum of the economic wealth of the American republic. As late as 1857, the American Supreme Court ruled in the famous Dred Scott case that African Americans, even if they were legally free, could not become citizens. At the heart of this decision was the idea that the African American was not fully human. As I have consequently argued elsewhere, the history of racial slavery in the United States and the Americas generally is one of historical catastrophe (Bogues 2010: 38-65). This means that the enslaved was “property in person” and not just a thing. Such a system could only be maintained by forms of regularized violence which became the everyday experience of the enslaved. This was a fact predicated upon the slave laws of the period. Because this system was one in which the black enslaved was a slave in perpetuity, determined by race, this form of chattel slavery was both distinctive and at the same time central to the making of the modern world.

It was also catastrophic in that structural ways of life marked by violence were created. The political theorist Bedour Alagraa notes that the various plantation societies in the so-called New World were locations in which what she calls the “cruel mathematics” of slavery created a normalized repetitive state (Alagraa 2021). In other words, racial slavery created a racial American state. The nineteenth century subsequently unfolded under the ideological rubrics of first the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which prohibited further European colonialization in the Americas, and then the concept of Manifest Destiny applied from 1845 onward, which justified the Western expansion of the United States. As a result, this racial state became an imperial racial one. This is the frame in which we grapple with the everyday contours of enslaved black life, the enforced work regimes they had to perform, and how this system is remembered today and the contemporary struggles around memory versus nostalgia.

Everyday Labor

Enforced slave labor consisted mostly, but not only, of backbreaking agricultural work. The economic engine of the system of racial slavery was the plantation. As a model of economic production, plantations can be described as large-scale operations primarily based on agriculture. During the early colonial period at the beginning of the sixteenth century, plantations in the Portuguese colony of São Tomé were the largest in the world producing sugar. These plantations became the model for the American mainland, with Brazil receiving its first major plantation by 1530. There were different crops grown on these plantations: tobacco, cotton, rice, and sugar cane. The enslaved labor regime consisted of “gangs” doing all the necessary work of clearing land, planting, caring for, and then reaping these crops. In this work regime, there was no gendered division of labor, as both men and women and oftentimes children performed this work. They also cared for livestock and built the infrastructure of the plantations. The social organization and character of this plantation work created a context in which some writers have named the enslaved as the proletariat of their time. Studies have shown that oftentimes the various companies involved in procuring the African enslaved targeted skilled Africans for these tasks. So, for example, the growing of rice required knowledge of appropriate techniques and, thus, many slave-trading companies focused on capturing slaves from what became known as the “rice coast“ of Africa, from Senegal to Sierra Leone. The historical records show that of the various African nations, Mende and Wolof had sophisticated knowledge of rice-growing techniques which were required for the rice plantations in North America. All of the above belie the unskilled character conventionally attributed to enslaved labor.

Plantations were not just venues for forced agricultural labor. Many were also home to factories. It was the enslaved who worked in these factories and, when mills began to emerge on the United States economic landscape, again it was the enslaved who did the labor. The same is true of textile factories and ironworks. Enslaved men were also sailors and worked in the whaling industry. Before emancipation, the figures suggest that over 25 percent of the workers in the whaling industry were blacks, many of them enslaved. In the port cities, black enslaved mariners were critical to the ships transporting cash crops, serving as navigators and pilots (Rediker 2025: 10). Their presence also created conditions for the enslaved to escape by sea and rivers. They also built the plantation homes of the master elite class and, in some cases, decorated them with pottery. For example, Edgefield District in South Carolina became known for pottery produced by the enslaved.

Many enslaved people were also engaged in domestic work on the plantation, cooking, cleaning, and especially caregiving to the children of the planter class. An examination of the wills of many planters showed that enslaved women were left to the planters’ children so that the child could be cared for. Additionally, no discussion about the work of the enslaved would be complete without reference to the sexual exploitation of enslaved women. As news about the possible abolition of the transatlantic slave trade gathered steam in the early 1800s, many planters began to create “breeding grounds.” These were plantations which specialized in the biological reproduction of the enslaved. By 1808 these plantations became an integral part of the system of racial slavery, maintaining the economic riches of the cotton plantation system, which is often called the “Cotton Kingdom.” One consequence of this was that states like Virgina and Maryland operated as export zones of enslaved people to other states like Louisiana and Mississippi. This economic network created a social system that reproduced itself through sexual violence. All these regimes made violence the central form of power holding the system together.

This was the historical character of the social system that created the enormous wealth of the United States. The process of capital accumulation in the United States was rooted in racial slavery. This system did not allow for forms of full representative democracy. In what is perhaps the most important historical text in the writing of American history, Black Reconstruction, Du Bois notes that black men and women became “a central thread in the history of United States, at once a challenge to its democracy and always an important part of its economic history and social development” (W.E.B Du Bois 1936: 7). The question remains: How have Americans thought about this historical fact?

Memory versus Nostalgia

There has always been a mainstream current which denies the formative influence of racial slavery on American society and how it remains embedded within structural forms of anti-black racism. In American popular culture, this denial is often seen in the genres of the Western movies or historical epics and the idea of the “Lost Cause.” This current within US cinema began with The Birth of a Nation (1915) and continued in popular examples like Gone With the Wind (1939) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). The central idea of the “Lost Cause” is that during the American Civil War, the cause of the Southern states (called the Confederacy) was not about slavery, but about “the rights of states,” i.e. about individual states’ autonomy vis-à-vis the federal government. This denial was challenged in 2020 during the COVID pandemic with the activism of the Black Lives Matter Movement.

It not only protested against the police brutality regularly visited upon the African American community, but challenged the symbolic landscape of monuments which make up the schematics of an American public history and its representations of racial slavery. Over 160 monuments and symbols of racial slavery were subsequently removed. These included central confederate monuments of major figures like Robert E. Lee, General of the Confederate Army, and Jefferson Davis, who was the political leader of the Confederacy. Of note as well was the removal of figures like Christopher Columbus because of a general sentiment that, although he was not a slave trader himself, the Columbian voyages in the late fifteenth century inaugurated the European colonial project in the Americas. Surveys done at the time also showed that a significant number of white Americans felt that the history of slavery should be taught in the high school curriculum. However, the survey also made it clear that the majority of white Americans did not feel that slavery had any impact upon contemporary American society. For them, there was no connective tissue between the past and the present. For many others, though, the protests and actions of the Black Lives Matter Movement seemed to be a moment of reckoning, one in which the history of racial slavery might be confronted. This was not to be the case.

The 2024 re-election of President Donald Trump began a series of reversals, including a drive to restore major Confederate monuments. The administration declared that anti-black racism no longer existed in American society and that major museums like the Smithsonian should reduce their focus on “negative aspects of American history” and be more “celebratory”, focusing on America’s “exceptionalism”. All this continues to be part of the current regime’s policy on history, which in their terms is about “Restoring Truth and Sanity.” The regime now directs all federal agencies to prioritize “uplifting narratives” about American history. The administration has also established an advisory group called the “1776 Commission” to promote a “pro-American curriculum”. History is now at the center of the contest about the political direction of America.

Recalling Baldwin and his observation about how history is always present, we might add that once its presence is of a catastrophic character, then issues about democracy are not settled because not only is the historical catastrophe haunting but, unless confronted, it will continue to shape the ways of life and politics of a society.

Bibliography

Alagraa, Bedour: The Interminable Catastrophe, in: Offshoot Journal 2021, URL: https://offshootjournal.org/the-interminable-catastrophe/, [12.05.2026].

Baldwin,James: Collected Essays, The Library of America, 1998.

Bogues, Anthony: Empire of Liberty: Power Desire and Freedom, Dartmouth Press, 2010.

Du Bois, W. E. B.: Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880, Atheneum 1936.

Rediker, Marcus: Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea, Viking 2025.