Grimke & Form

Contemporary readers will acknowledge that Scripture condemns slavery without testing her patient explanation, so Grimke's Appeal to Christian Women of the South interests primarily for what it does not say. Here, for instance, slavery is condemned for its similarity to Catholicism:

The Catholics are universally condemned, for denying the
Bible to the common people, but, _slaveholders must not_ blame them,
for _they_ are doing the _very same thing_, and for the very same
reason, neither of these systems can bear the light which bursts
from the pages of that Holy Book.

Before we dismiss Grimke's obvious New England ethnocentrism, let's examine that part of this that is correct. The condition of most Catholics in Europe and the Americas during the 1800's might be described by the word serfs. One might say of serfs, "At least they were not owned," but that isn't rigorously true. One who owns something or someone is held to have certain rights over it, but not others. I own my car, but that does not give me the right to drive on the sidewalk, run red lights, or chase down pedestrians. I must provide for certain features of its upkeep; if the CHP officer decides I'm driving it in poor working condition, I may receive an injunction to fix the car or keep it off the road. Likewise, the owner of a propery may find that others have rights to certain parts of it -- that the city has rights to run a sidewalk across the front yard or that the electric company is entitled to dig for cables. European nobles had less ownership over serfs than did American slaveowners, but in some ways they had more power than did the Hebrew slaveholders that American apologists were fond of citing to defend slavery. Serfs married as they please, but they were serfs for life, as were their children.

If we treat ownership as something that may be nuanced, the group Grimke addresses, Christian Women in the South, is itself more owned than owning. Women are generally an odd group among the oppressed, for they're generally granted luxury (with stipulations), but with reduced sovereignty. That is, certain others, generally male, are seen as having rights over them: they're more owned than owning.

Grimke condemns slavery in part because it's similar to Catholicism. It's similar, she argues, because Catholic orthodoxy witholds information from its subjects. Since the Catholics don't, or didn't read the Vulgate, on which the Papacy has always based doctrine, Catholics have or had less sovereignty over whatever decisions they might make that involved scripture. Now, note, hte abolitionist Grimke considers this aspect of Catholocism sufficiently reprehensible that she may summon it to condemn slavery. But at the same time, the very women she addresses have trouble getting information:

Other books and papers might be a great help to you in this investigation, but they are not
necessary, and it is hardly probable that your Committees of Vigilance will allow you to have any other.

So Grimke finds use of the Vulgate constitutes a loss of sovereignty for the Catholics, a loss commensurate with at least some aspects of slavery, a slavery in itself of sorts. At the same time, these Committees of Vigilance will deny southern women any document except the Bible. Even if one agrees with Grimke that this is a lesser offense than denying the Bible itself, that's witholding a lot of information.

The condition of women in the 1800's, like the institution of slavery, is something from which contemporary Americans might feel we can distance ourselves with justice. But if we see ownership as something that can be nuanced, and knowledge as necessary for sovereignty, the points of similarity that arise can be downright scary:

• Media ownership rules have been lifted, allowing few companies to own nearly all US media, thereby filtering news and culture for most of the population.


• Monopoly media, since it need fear little contradiction, has little motive to risk offending large advertisers, who may have vested interests in political decisions.


• Land-line and satellite-owning conglomerates have lobbied Congress to allow them to charge content-producers for passage of information over high-speed lines. This would


• The above companies have managd to advertise on broadcast television the idea that allowing them to charge and thereby dictate Net content constitutes "Net Freedom." While the campaign failed in Congress (this time), the ads ran largely unopposed.


• Many so-called educators feel that the "job" of education is to "pass on culture," to inculcate values or, more nefariously, to "prepare students for corporate positions."

Clearly, all these involve the same kind of piracy of sovereignty, though advancing media technology has made the media environment more heterogenous, at least for those privelidged to pay attention.

The modernity of the situation of Southern Women becomes even more disturbing when one sees how similar the defenses for modern political fiascos are to antebellum defenses for slavery. Grimke argues against slavery based on the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." But this doctrine most are given simply in childhood becomes complex on application. We don't treat chickens as we would be treated, and we excuse that because they are differently other. Vegetarians may protest, perhaps justly, but we might as easily extend the analogy to carrots. I don't mean to minimize the major differences between applying a such a principle to people as opposed to chickens or even chickens as opposed to carrots, but the argument structurally resembles the argument an apologist might present for slaveholders: "The Golden Rule does not apply because the slaves are different."

To be clear, biological science and the slaveowners' well documented reproductive habits sharply contradict the apologists' argument in their behalf. But again the same form of argument comes into play repeatedly with regards to Amercan conflicts abroad. Note how the same form leads to bizarre ideation in each of the following arguments, which I suspect readers will find familiar:

• "We entered Vietnam because they were communists." They already implies that an entire population -- and one engaged in civil war at that! -- uniformly espoused a single ideology. Then, the passive construction were implies no action, but a state of being. Thus, they don't necessarily do anything that makes them communists; but when they sip tea, they sip tea as communists, and when they walk or bend over or scratch, they must do each of these things as communists. We could take their self-determination, then, because they were different. We can take what belongs to them because, not being free people, they are less deserving than us.
  
• We must remain in Iraq (Iran, Afghanistan, upi name it) because they are not ready for democracy.

The same rationale might have been used with equal justice by Edward Teach, for example, to justify his raids upon English and American shipping. The merchant and military crews had often been pressed into service or driven there by poverty; the profits would go to people who had not worked for them; and Teach's crew, by contrast, could vote on its course of action. Teach (AKA Blackbeard) held no slaves, in contrast to the Americans; he had no serfs and his workers voted, in contrast to the Spanish; he did not press people into service, in contrast to the English; he did not press sailors into service. His government may have been the most democratic in the English-speaking world in the 1800's.

Of course, that does no more for the ships he plundered than American voting rights do for Vietnamese, Iraqis, Argentines, Chilenos, Panamanians, Iranians, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Philipinos, Haitians, Nicaraguans, or -- well, given Greg Palast's recent work on how many Indian votes are thrown out, I'm tempted to add native Americans. But even if that constitutes a separate case, the list could be many times longer.

Grimke criticizes a warp in logic that has transcended theology, nominative ideology, and economic system to remain an active force. Formally, she does this by pointing out inconsistencies between a particular position with a document on which its purveyors hold it to be based. This does seem dated, but it's not because either the mistake or the slavery have stopped. And it's not because the Bible has ceased to be perverted as an instrument of torture. Each American president since Jimmy Carter has used faith to excuse killing for profit.

Perhaps Grimke seems dated because of a couple aspects of language. First, she regards scriptural arguments seriously enough to incorporate scripture in her answer, whereas contemporary western theocracy claims literal authorization by a text that it takes figuratively and which its leaders may not have read systematically. The other may be simply because slavery has taken different names. So we can sit over a cup of chocolate and relax, having abolished it.