How Social Death Leads to Actual Death
When you’re reduced to a non-person, it becomes easier for others to dispose of you.
In 2016, it was estimated that 258 black folk were killed by police. Mothers, fathers, husbands wives, children, grandchildren; you name it, they were murdered. This is nothing new. Black folk have been murdered in copious amounts since they were shackled up and brought over on boats but now they are being killed in their own homes, on their own land. While the causes of their deaths might be different from person to person, the underlying reason can arguably be attributed to one thing: social death.
What is Social Death?
In his book “Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study” Orlando Patterson spent pages describing social death as a concept which alienates people, specifically black slaves, from their rights. Black folk were treated as non-persons, cattle, and labor that they can exploit. They were stripped of their culture and forced to assimilate to American values and even then they were still seen as simply a Slave.
Additionally, slaves became genealogical isolates. They had no claim on relatives or ancestors and whatever kin they may have had would be sold off to other plantations as per their Master’s orders and the slaves had no say. At that point they were just property who could own no property themselves. Their own names didn’t even belong to them, there were Americanized names given to them in the same way someone might name their livestock.
Harsh, I know, but true nonetheless. Slaves were not considered people and this continued well after slavery as well. Jump forward to the 1960’s when black folk were trying to buy homes in North Lawndale Chicago and they were forced to buy on contract, which meant paying for the house in full rather than installments, and then subsequently had their communities redlined.
By redlining their communities, white homeowners assigned value to black folks homes. Houses that neighbored a black family’s house went down in value which is indicated by the red in the photo to the left. They were given a value grade of D and the homes in predominantly white neighborhoods are shown in blue and green and those homes were given an A grade and more expensive.
Black folks continual social death affected their ability to buy homes because at that point they still weren’t considered people. They were a nuisance to white homeowners and their solution was to corral black folk into “ghetto” communities.
Furthermore, it didn’t help that racist caricatures depicting black folk as monkey’s were ubiquitously strewn about in newspapers or plastered to buildings. It only further de-legitimatized black folks humanity and perpetuated the animal stereotype. Illustrations like the ones shown below were even shown in kids programs.
Black Lives Matter
In 2013, a hashtag called #BlackLivesMatter was trending on twitter as a response to Trayvon Martins untimely death. It was founded by Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza and has been tweeted over and over, especially when a there was a new death in the black community.
It was his murder that kicked off the idea that social death is still an occurring concept. He was seen as a trope. Not a person, not a human, but a trope, a stereotype, an exaggeration of who he really was. After his death, black folk were being killed off as if for sport. Every week it was someone new and every week it was for an asinine reason.
Over 250 black people were killed in 2016 and at least 100 were killed in 2015 because of police brutality.
When black folk are reduced to their stereotypes it becomes easier for someone like a police officer to justify his actions, in same way that white slave owners so easily sold and purchased slaves like they were another item on their grocery list. When they are stripped of their rights, culture, and names then exploiting them is no longer an issue of morality. When you don’t have to think about their family or their home that they left behind then you don’t need to think about the consequences of owning somebody. For how can someone feel bad about buying an object?
Slaves were just culture-less bodies to the white man. They were simply labor. Labor that could breathe, eat, and live, but labor nonetheless. The white man did not look at the slave and think that his exploitation was wrong. He looked at the slave and saw an economic future for his plantation. Today, people see black folk and think of the enemy. People see black folk and walk the other way on the street. All because a little over a hundred years ago, the white man uprooted the lives of thousands of black folk and turned their identities into nothing and that carried on and on through the years.
It’s time we stop. It’s time we get rid of the “hoodie” trope. It’s time we get rid of the caricatures. It’s time we stop the murders because black lives do matter. Black folk are people too, they are human too, and they should be treated as such.
