THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

In 2005, I published Autobiography of an Ex-White Man, a book about my experiences during my sixteen years as a member of the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and what those years taught me about America.  In the third chapter there appear the following paragraphs.  They might help readers to understand more fully the protests now roiling American cities.

“Needless to say, any individual slave was not likely to be whipped very often.  Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, in a widely discussed and much criticized book, [Time on the Cross 1974] report that on one plantation whose owner, Bennet Barrow, kept careful records of his two hundred slaves, about half the slaves were not whipped at all during a two year period, and overall there were 0.7 whippings per slave per year.  Since a number of readers have actually concluded from this bit of data that things weren’t so bad in the Old South, I tried a little thought experiment in an effort to imagine what effect whippings might have had on a slave.

Down the road from the University of Massachusetts is Amherst College, a famous private liberal arts institution that has on several occasions been ranked the best college in America.  It has a faculty of two hundred – just about as large as the slave population on Barrow’s plantation.  Suppose a whipping post were set up in front of the Robert Frost Library in the central college common.  And suppose that on an average of once every four or five days, an Amherst College professor were stripped to the waist, man or woman, and whipped at that post until the blood ran for some infraction of college rules or simply for failing to grade papers on time.  Now, as a member of the faculty, I would presumably be intelligent enough and educated enough to be able to calculate that my chances of being whipped were only 0.7 per year, and I would also have noticed that if I was extremely careful, and never talked back to the Dean or the President, I might never be whipped at all.  Nevertheless, I think it is reasonable to suppose that the steady progression of brutal public whippings would have, how shall we say, a chilling effect on me.

Such a fantasy seems absurd, of course, but that is just another way of saying that we White people don’t really think of the slaves as people like ourselves, regardless of the political correctness of our sentiments.  Whipping slaves is terrible, cruel, inhuman, but it is something that happens to other people, whereas whipping professors, bizarre though that may sound, is something that might happen to me.”