The Mark of Slavery

In a 2001 essay, Douglas C. Baynton argued that “disability” is a master trope to justify discrimination based on supposed innate bodily and mental differences associated with social hierarchies: racism and sexism are imputations of naturally occurring differences in physical and mental ability (Douglas C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, 2001, pp. 33–57). The Mark of Slavery is the second recent book to elaborate on that concept in relation to the most hierarchical social formation in U.S. history: slavery. Slavery, Jenifer L. Barclay shows, produced widespread physical impairments due to “overwork, abuse, punishment, insufficient material resources, dangerous working environments, and poor living spaces” (pp. 15–16). Yet it also provided legal measures to ensure that enslavers did not suffer from the resulting diminution of the value of their human property. Wills, for instance, could distribute economic liabilities posed by aged, infirm, or otherwise “unsound” slaves to ensure equitable distribution of assets. Enslaved people sometimes created counterweights to this ruthless economization of ability and disability. Disabled bondspeople often found meaningful roles as caregivers for nondisabled loved ones, serving as nurses, cooks, gardeners, or cleaners. Such roles could be especially valued given that West African spiritual traditions sometimes associated blindness, hunched backs, short stature, and other disabilities with special powers. Meanwhile, southern physicians reinforced long-standing notions of Blackness as comprising an arrangement of supposed mental disabilities that warranted specialized medical investigation. They lent scientific legitimacy to older slave laws that held enslaved persons to be subhuman property—unless they committed crimes, which paradoxically afforded them a sliver of human agency. This “double character” meant that inflicting physical injury (sometimes to the point of disablement) was the only viable means of punishment, since fines were impossible to levy on forced laborers, and imprisonment would only deprive enslavers of their captives' labor (p. 69

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