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The inner language of oppression [1]
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Date: 2025-07-16
We hold the writers Toni Morrison and James Baldwin in great esteem because they have provided us with the language of our experience. Slavery involved one’s body but also the mind. Morrison in “Beloved” describes the mental desperation of a mother who was so intent on keeping her children from slavery that she killed her child. Baldwin in “Notes of a Native Son” said that the sickness of white supremacy made our nation ill. There are many other authors who write on the same themes. However, Morrison and Baldwin are the ones who, to my mind and my generation, wrote about slavery and its legacy with the most depth and clarity.
Having grown up in the shadow of the United States’ biggest slave market, I have struggled to find language that explains my beloved city and my existence. As previous articles in this series have described, the artifacts of enslavement surround us in plain view. Hidden inside of us, however, are the responses of our souls, spirits, and maybe even our DNA to being enslaved and inheriting the psychoses of a legally inhumane state. To expose and define their effects on you and me has been my white whale.
In this writer’s process, I needed words to describe something amiss. Early on, I felt that my parents were really smart and kind, but always reactive in public. No matter how they and my other family and friends tried to hide it, I observed minor slights and the tension it produced — as common as my father being called by his first name by someone white who introduced himself as Mr. Jones, for example — or as major as entering stores through the back door that my parents called “to be convenient” which they often substituted with the words “to be safe.”
The lack of respect, the threat of injury or arrest, the forced patience of being white-splained manifested themselves in my neighborhood. There was drinking, drugging, and certain self-destructive attitudes that we celebrated as care forgotten, but actually masked depression. Why did so many people have undiagnosed, outsized sadness? A lack of health care, low-paying jobs, and poor housing or in my Black middle-class area, redlining. All of those causes could be traced up the generational tree to the ownership of their ancestors and the traumas of family separation, including for people abandoned by newly “white” relatives.
I had to get past words like “herds” of Blacks that I saw in one of the first documents that I found in the basement of a building in the city hall complex where records were once kept. Then I had to get past the costs of mulattos, Negroes, griffs, Creoles, and more in the sales records. I added all these painful words to my vocabulary. I had to find a place in my spirit for the way African descendants were casually treated as well as the nonchalant handling of their archival records by the clerks — who microwaved their breakfast in a room with rare documents. The way our past was treated caused me major and minor heartbreaks.
As a young writer at a book conference, I asked a very popular and elderly white children’s author about how she was able to write so gleefully about New Orleans. Didn’t she experience segregation too — but from the other side? She said she didn’t notice the racism. I then accepted callousness and indifference in the publishing environment to my career—the one I had chosen for its commitment to honesty and human rights.
My disappointment that day went so deep that I complained at length about Southern attitudes to the publishing sponsor that brought me to the conference. She commiserated, then said, “it must be terrible to be Black.” It was her way, I believe, of trying to temper my emotions at the venue. My head swam a little as I realized that the point of the conference was to be upbeat, approachable, and sales-like. The irony was that we were on the road with my new book — “Melitte,” the story of an enslaved Louisiana girl. I won’t judge my sponsor in this moment, but myself. My learned behavior was blowing up an opportunity because of my rage. Yes, the rage from slavery more than a century earlier was still so real to me that it clouded my ability to assess the situation.
I am writing about these phenomena because even if we mark the buildings, then we have to find the places in our hearts and minds where the edifices of slavery have crushed parts of ourselves. Language and the thoughts behind them have been my quest.
In the sixties and seventies, people talked quite a bit about a slave mentality. It was the idea that people were easily led, believed in their own inferiority, and acted in ways contrary to their own best interests. We still know it when we see it. We still comment on it. Often, not very kindly. No tolerance for the slave mind, right? Our self-righteousness is part of an ugly legacy of divide and conquer.
There is a landscape inside of ourselves, our community, and our city that slavery has shaped. Writing has helped me travel with caution over its raging currents and mucky swamps. Words have led me to ideas that define my experiences — the legacy of my lineage and my New Orleans. I try daily to arrive at the right word for the ugliness of slavery and its unreasonable inheritances. Once I find the right word, I realize its antonym. Then, I can live differently.
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https://veritenews.org/2025/07/16/devils-bargain-language-of-oppression/
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