Blog Entry #1

Jefferson’s Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism, by Roger Wilkins, stressed the importance of investigating the environment, culture, and emotional consciousness of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison and George Mason in order to gain an understanding of Americas collective story and identity. But perhaps most importantly, the book showed that the structure of the American identity was founded on slavery and the accumulation of wealth and power for an elite group of male masters. All four men, Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and Mason achieved great economic status because of the “slave society [which] had been made possible by the perfection of the systematic international trade in slaves” (Wilkins 13). During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Africa, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere created international commerce through the buying and selling of slaves. The African body became a commodity or object, which only received worth through labor. Due to the theories of race during the Enlightenment, the social development of racial slavery was justified because of thoughts surrounding “white stood for purity and beauty, and black for evil and filth” (Wilkins 16). Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and Mason regarded black human beings as exotic and non-Christian; therefore, they tolerated and overlooked the unequal treatment of slaves to build wealth and power in their young nation. By the mid 1700’s, the enslavement of Africans became Americas “economic machine” for the wealthy members of society (Wilkins 13). The social dynamic between slave and master was inherently unequal and as the economic dependency on slavery increased in America, so did the violence against slaves. The slaves, who helped generate economic production and supplied cheap and efficient labor, knew they were fully human, but the masters used violence to instill fear to keep the slaves oppressed and obedient. Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Mason, and other men relied on the wealth and power generated by slaves because the mass-production of the tobacco crop, which drove the nations economy, required intense work. Unfortunately, slaves served as tools for their masters. They were perceived as only products, property, and ultimately a source of wealth in America. The enslavement of Africans turned into the economic endeavor of commodification, or the process of objectification. As a means to push back against commodification and enslavement, “slaves wanted some acknowledgement of their humanity” (Wilkin 22). While trying to retain a sense of humanity, slaves turned to subjectivity to disrupt the structural ranking and ordering of human beings in the American society. Recorded history is primarily focused on the societal members with money and power, but to fully understand the complex American identity it is imperative to recognize the multiple groups that make up the entire society, who were less documented, but equally as instrumental in the development of this country.