The Slave Trade as Seen Through New Databases, and an Ethics of Care
New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie explores how historians approach this hard history
“How exactly do we relate to data that allows someone — anyone — to identify a specific enslaved person? How do we wield these powerful tools for quantitative analysis without abstracting the human reality away from the story? And what does it mean to study something as wicked and monstrous as the slave trade using some of the tools of the trade itself?” - Jamelle Bouie for the New York Times.
In his January 28 column, “We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was,” NYTimes columnist Jamelle Bouie takes a deep dive into the history of the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (what we refer to as historiography.) Bouie begins by recounting how we know what we know today — a tour of how historical understanding has developed — and I dare say improved — over the last century and a half. In 1888, for example, Columbia University historian George Bancroft estimated that 3,250,000 souls had been captured in a “gigantic…crime.”
Today, Bouie explains, researchers at Slave Voyages report that more than 12,000,000 Africans were subjected to the trade between the 16th and 19th centuries. Their work only underscores Bancroft’s judgement that the trade had been a gigantic crime. Such judgements are not those of historians alone. In 2001, France declared the slave trade and slavery to have been a crime against humanity in its Taubira Law.
New to our understanding of the slave trade’s scale is the research of Dr. Jennie Williams (JHU PhD 2020) who explains that after the closing of the international trade by the US in 1808, the domestic slave trade caught an estimated one to two million people of African descent in human trafficking plied mostly between the upper and lower South. Williams’ project — “Oceans of Kinfolk” — documents more than 63,000 of those people — transported between Baltimore and New Orleans by water — in a searchable database. (You can watch our Hard Histories discussion with Dr. Williams here.)
Johns Hopkins assistant professor of history, Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson, a specialist of the slave trade and of digital humanities research, explained to Bouie how such work must be committed to an “ethics of care” and a “morality” which ensures “that Black people in the audience feel like they are not being assaulted again by the information in the project or by the methods behind the project or any of that.”
Each semester, researchers in the Hard Histories at Hopkins Lab explore the ethical and moral dimensions of our work through a series of modules developed by graduate teaching assistant and PhD candidate Malaurie Pilatte. Bouie’s questions are among those we must answer as we aim to do justice to present historical understanding and, at the same time, to be just with those who today live the legacies of slavery’s crime against humanity.
MSJ.