Beyond Slavery
By
9.25.24 |
Symposium Introduction
Chris Goodingās Beyond Slavery: Christian Theology and Rehabilitation from Human Trafficking is an important and timely interdisciplinary work, navigating deftly between theological reflection, field-work analysis, and ethical and practical suggestions. His book is a theologically informed investigation into the best practices of rehabilitation for victims of sex and labour human-trafficking. Gooding conducted fifty-four interviews in India with survivors and the workers who care for them. Human-trafficking in India and around the world is a troublingly persistent reality; yet the God worshiped by Christians is a God of freedom (Luke 4:18ā21; 2 Cor 3:17). Goodingās practical and theological proposals warrant examination and discussion.
Gooding argues that slavery is a demonic power that adapts to new situations, creating new forms when older forms diminish. Slavery also traps victims in their own minds, even after their material bondage has ended. Their sense of self, relationships, and God has become distorted. Gooding offers a theological analysis of slavery that shows how the God of the Bible, revealed in Jesus, is a God of true and universal liberation, not bondage, never a master who lords power over others. He examines various rehabilitation efforts and analyzes various institutions and practices. He especially advocates for community organizing, non-violent action, and restorative justice practices to address the complex problems which arise for trafficked persons.Ā
Turning briefly to the responses below, we begin with Vincent Lloyd, who asks Gooding about the definition of slavery itself. Lloyd proposes an abstract definition of slavery: the will of the master exercised over the subject with public sanction. In history, this was very closely approximated in the trans-Atlantic slave trade with devastating effects on slaves and their descendants. But other cases are further from the abstract definition, even if they exhibit slavery-like dynamics. Not everything is slavery. Lloyd wonders if human trafficking qualifies, particularly because his abstract definition insists on slavery as public. Lloyd instead proposes examining human trafficking under the framework of abuse, which is not public. The response to trafficking-as-abuse might focus on community building and public sharing, drawing out into the open the abuse that was kept quiet and which blurred the lines between harm and care.
Joerg Rieger examines some of the historical and economic contexts of slavery. He argues that we currently live in the āCapitalocene,ā a geological epoch dominated by capitalist economics and its correlative anthropology, ecology, and theology. Capitalism itself may be an economics of slavery, privileging profit over workers. This privileging amplifies the gap between rich and poor, which is mirrored in the vast power differentials in the systems of slavery described by Gooding. Rieger suggests class analysis as an important lens on both victim-perpetrators in trafficking contexts (those who started as victims and were given positions of power over their fellow slaves) and the middle class in the North American economic context. For Rieger, class concerns not primarily wealth or privilege, but power. Even those with modest privilege, like victim-perpetrators or the middle class, may have very limited power. It is thus fundamental to engage with the massive power imbalance between those at the very top and all those in the middle (victim-perpetrators) and bottom (victims). Solidarity should be promoted between all below the ruling class, in society and in trafficking organizations, instead of small differentials of power keeping various lower levels antagonistic towards each other.
Elizabeth Schick turns to the question of trauma and autonomy. Traumatized persons often struggle to be free. They act according to their traumatic experience which may limit their relational capacity. But if their agency and relationality is thus distorted, are they able to freely choose God and love of neighbor? Especially if they come to misunderstand āGodā as the source of their trauma? Turning to Karl Rahner, Schick describes Godās purpose for humanity as communion with himself. The human being has the free will to accept or reject this purpose. The attenuated autonomy of a traumatized person problematizes this picture. For Schick, drawing on Aquinas, autonomy can be restored through relational grace: relationship with God and relationship with others. The Church is called to be the community of relational grace, overcoming distorted relationships and promoting possibility of the personās free choice for or against God.
Drenda Landers examines the category of moral injury. She thinks that victim-perpetrators are an epitome of the demonic character of slavery, pushed by their victimization into self-protection. Moral injury describes the mental anguishāguilt, confusion, and lack of agencyāof persons who felt forced into a decision which led to unintended harmful consequences. This category applies to victim-perpetrators like brothel madams, who must either take a managerial position or else risk serious consequences, such as punishment or homelessness. Landers suggests that moral injury might be a helpful category that captures simultaneously the personās victimhood and culpability. Moral injury puts individual actions in perspective, as there are systemic, indeed demonic, forces at work beyond individual choices.Ā
We conclude with Amy Levad, who first notes how the category of āsocial deathā is aptly applied to both victims of trafficking and victims of mass incarceration. She questions, though, how similar the practices of slavery and incarceration are, as the latter are legitimated by the State. She then inquires into the meaning of restorative justice for those trafficked persons who were both victims and perpetrators: does restorative justice involve practices, outcomes, or both? She wonders if Gooding examines the outcomes at the expense of a richer set of practices. She proposes some further communal restorative justice practices and suggests looking to practices that are rooted in the specific cultural context of the harm done (India, in this case). Finally, she wonders if Goodingās reflection on practices might suggest different sets of outcomes.
A final personal word: Chris welcomed me into his home when I was looking for housing as a graduate student many years ago. I have thoroughly appreciated his friendship and wisdom. Itās a privilege to facilitate discussion around Beyond Slavery in this forum. Many thanks to him and to our excellent and thoughtful responders.
10.2.24 |
Response
Reclaiming Solidarity Against the DemonicĀ
Humans enslaving other humans may well be one of the most heinous acts imaginable. For this reason alone, using the theological category of the demonic when engaging enslavement is certainly appropriate, and we owe Chris Gooding a debt of gratitude for spelling things out so clearly in relation to his work in India.Ā
Yet, āthe devil is in the details,ā as the saying goes, and it would be beneficial for us to take a closer look at what is going on here. Adding some perspective and looking at slavery throughout history, it looks as if things are getting progressively worse. The enslavement of Africans for labor in the plantation systems all over the Americas starting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marked a new stage in the history of slavery, as the commercialization of the slave trade as well as of the use of slaves for producing profits for the masters was more destructive of the lives of enslaved people than ever before. So-called chattel slavery in the Americas existed for the profit of various players in the economic system, from the slave traders to the plantation owners, with little regard for the well-being of the enslaved beyond the maintenance of their labor power. Even the lives of the enslaved only mattered as far as they could be considered investments. For the slave owners this meant that slaves were subject to an economic calculation that determined everything else.
Slavery today follows similar trajectories, although experts have argued that the situation of enslaved people is now worse than it was even in the American plantation economy because slaves are no longer the sizeable investments they once were and thus have increasingly become even more expendable than ever. Economic desperation around the globe has become so great that there is a ready supply of people to be enslaved. This means that slaves have become even more subject to economic calculations than ever before, with lives being worth even less. Add to that the fact that there are now more enslaved people than ever in history, and we have a perfect storm brewing.1 While Goodingās account does not mention this broader situation and its urgency, it should be considered if the goal is to search for solutions to the problem of slavery.
Before addressing what it might take to move beyond slavery, we need to take another look at the big picture. While Gooding does not investigate why things are getting worse, a realistic response to the problem of slavery depends on it. Could it be that humanity is somehow deteriorating, as some seem to be assuming? Does the problem have to do with moral failure? Elsewhere, I have argued that we find ourselves in the Capitalocene, the geological age when capitalist exploitation and extraction is shaping everything, not only economics, ecology, and politics but also communities, interhuman relationships, and belief systems. Even images of God are affected by the Capitalocene, as images of God as the slave master, which Gooding observes, may not be unrelated to images of God as the heavenly CEO. Taking a closer look at what is going on in this era may help develop a sense for why slavery keeps getting worse.
For starters, at the heart of the Capitalocene is the imperative to produce profit. In Goodingās project, two forms of enslavement are highlighted, sex trafficking and bonded labor in India, driven by the profit they produce for the owners, if necessary even at the expense of human life. What remains to be done in response to this observation is to draw a connection to the established capitalist logic that profits are for the benefit of owners and stockholders rather than for the benefit of the workers. This may come as a surprise to many, but capitalism has followed this logic at least since the Dodge brothers successfully sued Henry Ford for failing to privilege profit for stockholders.2 What if the logic of slavery were not an aberration but merely the logic of capitalism taken to its very extreme?Ā
Two interrelated phenomena come together here. The first is that, according to this logic, working people count less and less, which can be observed in everyday economic life where benefits keep getting slashed, salaries are kept artificially low, and people can be fired with little recourse. While this increasingly affects even people in the middle class, these dynamics get amplified in the extreme in the lives of enslaved people. The second phenomenon is that those at the very top of the economy continue to increase their power and wealth in exponential fashion, seen in everyday economic life where top-level compensations and benefits keep rising, the most important decisions are made by a few powerful individuals (not only in economics but also in politics and religion), and even if things do not work out, golden parachutes are awaiting for the few while the many are left to clean up the mess.Ā
To be sure, the problem here is not greedy individuals but a system that not only sanctions but stimulates growing inequalities, not only in terms of wealth but also in terms of power. Goodingās account of sex trafficking and bonded labor hints at the system briefly when he notes the profound difference between the beneficiaries at the very top of this system and all others, including those in the middle, but the system disappears when he talks about solutions. Granted, his concern is for the victims, but without addressing and engaging the overall system, it is hard to see how true change might be possible long-term, and even victim care seems to fall short.Ā
In order to get to the question of what true change might require, take a look at another group at the heart of Goodingās account. In both sex trafficking and bonded labor, there are people in the middle who are both victims and perpetrators. In the case of sex trafficking, he is especially interested in the roles of the managers who are running brothels, because many of them were enslaved sex workers themselves when they were younger; as they grew older and less desirable to their customers, they were forced to choose between begging and starvation on the one hand and staying in the business on the other, to make ends meet. In the case of bonded workers in India, there are the so-called mestris, who are bonded laborers promoted to overseers acting in the interest of the owners and who often identify with the owners to such a degree that they control the other bonded workers more harshly than even the owners would.
Gooding notes that while there are many programs that seek to help the victims, there are no programs that seek to help these people in the middle. His quest for restorative justice for these victim-perpetrators points in the right direction, but this conversation could be strengthened by keeping in mind the drivers of the system and the class that usually disappears when the foundational parameters of class analysis are missing. What might we learn by looking at the bigger picture?
Class analysis, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is not primarily a matter of stratification, of status, or of income levels but a matter of power.3 How much power someone has at work is a prime indicator for someoneās class. The members of the working class, which is always the majority of the population (even in the United States), have little or no power over their workāthis class includes the underemployed and unemployed. The ruling class, by contrast, is the one in charge and usually well connected and organized. This leaves those in the middle who, like Goodingās victim-perpetrators, have some privilege but little power because they are not ultimately in charge. In the situation of sex trafficking and bonded labor, it is those in the middle who are responsible for making things run smoothly, who do the dirty work for those on top, and who are taking the fall and go to jail if brothels and illegal bonded labor sites are raided by the police.Ā
For the sake of developing the bigger picture, without losing sight of the differences, some of these dynamics are surprisingly similar to the situation of the middle class in the United States. Take the example of a manager of a Walmart store, who is the agent of the company when it comes to dealing with the employees but whose power is kept in check by clear directives from the top. The basic role of this manager is to make sure that the store makes maximum profits by keeping benefits and wages as low as possible, enforcing discipline for workers who are kept below full-time work to avoid having to pay for benefits, and keeping the public eye, critics, and protestors at bay when necessary. These managers make fairly decent salaries that may put them in the top 10 percent of US incomes, but their compensation is only a small fraction of that of the top executives and the major stockholders of the company, reflected in the limited power they hold.Ā
While in all these cases mid-level managers are closer to their workers than to their bosses at the top, they usually do not identify with their workers but with those at the top. In the case of sex trafficking and bonded labor, there is also the phenomenon of captive mentality, according to which victim-perpetrators often tend to identify closely with their victimizers, a matter that might be worth exploring in relation to representatives of the middle class who cater to the ruling class.
Goodingās suggestions for addressing the resulting conflicts for mid-level staff in brothels and bonded labor sites draw on the methods of restorative justice in contrast to retributive justice. Instead of punishing, condemning, and demonizing them, he suggests guided encounters between victims and perpetrators, with the goal of developing or restoring empathy in the perpetrators, leading to restitution. As studies have shown, these efforts are often successful in the criminal system in the United States, where victims have a better chance of getting some justice and perpetrators are more likely to confess, change, and relapse less often.Ā
Applied to the middle class in the United States, this approach also might hold some promise. That mid-level leaders typically have more in common with the working class than with the ruling class can be shown by simple numbers based on compensation levels (even tenured full professor salaries at major universities are always significantly closer to campus cafeteria workers than to top university officials) but even more so by the level of actual power that people in various mid-level positions wield. What prevents many from seeing this is a faulty assumption that mid-level privilege translates into power.4
While developing empathy between those in the middle and those at the bottom is promising and can help develop solidarity, what is typically missing, both in Goodingās restorative justice project and in the logic of the middle class in the United States, is a more profound awareness of the role of the ruling class. Put in terms of Goodingās theological analysis, what is missing is a deeper encounter with he calls the demonicāin this case what is demonic about slavery, which mirrors what is demonic in the Capitalocene. To be sure, zeroing in on the demonic in these cases does not mean demonizing wealthy individuals or even individual overlords of slavery. Such widespread demonizing of individuals is usually due to the lack of class analysis, which overlooks that the demonic is manifest in distorted relationships that are systemic.
How to engage this demonic? Restorative justice has some good advice, but the systemic aspect is surprisingly absent. If profound problems like slavery cannot be addressed at the level of individual victims and mid-level perpetrators, as I am suggesting, justice will need to engage the system itself. Developing a systemic perspective, in turn, will also help address more appropriately restorative justiceās concerns for criminal acts from petty theft to murder. Note that what I am arguing for here is not some utopian notion of justice that promises complete liberation from enslavement but a different way of engaging victims and mid-level perpetrators in terms of developing bonds of solidarity in light of systemic entanglements. Here is where class analysis and the analysis of slavery can join forces. If we can figure out what solidarity might mean for the American middle class, we might be also able to figure out what solidarity might mean for the system of slavery.Ā
A couple of suggestions by way of conclusions: If the middle class can break its deep-seated infatuation with the ruling class and realize that its fate is linked up with the fate of the working class (whether this relates to questions of climate change, the future of oneās children, or the viability of retirement), solidarity emerges that is not built on moral appeals but on the simple recognition that āan injury to one is an injury to allā (as the saying goes in the labor unions). Gooding observes how deep-seated infatuation with the masters also ties down the mid-level victim-perpetrators of slavery, so this is where some of the most important work will need to be done if solidarity is to be an option. Part of the work of solidarity for the middle class is realizing that what is happening to the most exploited and oppressed is ultimately happening to 99 percent of us as well. For the context of slavery, this means that those in the middle need to remind themselves that by moving up within the system of slavery they are still subject to its destructive dynamics and that ultimately this system is likely to lead to the untimely death of all involved, except for the bosses and owners. This opens the way to developing deeper solidarities among all the injured parties, not losing sight, of course, that some are much worse off than others. This also means that solidarity needs to be guided from the perspective of where the pressures are greatest, which is why I have coined the notion of deep solidarity in my work.
Solidarity, therefore, is necessary for overcoming demonic structures at all levels. For theologians who dare to engage the demonic in these ways, the gain is a new awareness of a God who is completely unlike āthat which nothing greater can be perceivedā (Anselm of the Canterbury) envisioned in the image of the slave masters or the ruling elites produced by the system.
For data on slavery today, see Kevin Bales, Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2016).↩
See the 1919 case of Dodge v. Ford Motor Company.↩
See Joerg Rieger, Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2022), chapter 3.↩
For the distinction of privilege and power see āPrivilege and Power: An Interventions Forum,ā Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice, June 27, 2022, https://www.religionandjustice.org/interventions-forum-on-privilege-and-power-in-the-capitalocene, as well as the more in-depth reflections in chapter 4 of Rieger, Theology in the Capitalocene.↩
Vincent Lloyd
Response
Beyond Abuse
Slavery is bad. Today this is an entirely uncontroversial statement. We are perplexed by how there was once a time when human beings did not recognize this truth.
Since people today hold such firm convictions about slavery, many bad things are likened to slavery, though simile quickly slips into metaphor. If there is something bad happening and you want to mobilize an audience to stop that bad thing, you might want to call it a kind of slavery: the treatment of workers (whether they be janitors or sports stars), the treatment of children by their parents, the treatment prison guards mete out to those incarcerated, the treatment of peoples in the global South by corporations and organizations from the global North. In recent years, as sensitivities around the trans-Atlantic slave trade have increased, the broad use of slavery in popular discourse seems to have decreased, but it remains familiar. The language of slavery particularly attaches to human trafficking for sex work and bonded laborāthe starting points of Chris Goodingās new book. These are very bad things, indeed.
As Gooding points out, there are sociological definitions of slavery (most famously Orlando Pattersonās) and there are theological definitions of slavery (often associating slavery with the demonic). Many approaches to slavery start with empirical examples of slavery and look for a common denominator. However, sometimes it is helpful to start from the other direction, to conjure a picture of slavery in laboratory conditions, so to speak, and then to see that paradigm case imperfectly instantiated in our messy world. In laboratory conditions, slavery looks like arbitrary rule: the capacity of one to exert his will over another. (This is also a classical definition of domination, i.e., mastery, which is also, importantly, confusing oneself for god.) In the laboratory, there are just two individuals. At any moment, the master wishes for this or that; the enslaved must respond to those wishes, must be ready to respond to potential wishes.Ā
In real life, of course, things are much messier. Desires are not purely arbitrary. There are forms of resistance, ranging from confrontation to slow-walking. And of course there are more people around, intermediaries and collaborators and co-conspirators. To make things even more muddy, there is an instinct toward mastery in all of us, even the most marginalized, and there are ways in which each of us must respond to the arbitrary will of others, even those of us with the most power. With all these complications, it may seem as if the paradigm case of slavery is altogether useless. Yet we can see certain empirical examples which are, in fact, illuminated by the paradigm caseāin particular, the trans-Atlantic slave trade seems to approach slavery in laboratory conditions. As connections to language, family, culture, land, and religion are violently severed in the Middle Passage, what is left is an enslaved individual reduced to responding to the arbitrary will of their enslaver. I take this to be an animating impulse behind much recent work in Black Studies: that there is something distinctive about the Atlantic slave trade that produces lasting effects and that is unlike other bad things humans do to each other. In my formulation, what is distinctive about the Atlantic slave trade is its similarity to the paradigm case of slavery, understood as pure domination.1
I think there are both secular and theological reasons to adopt this account of slavery. There is a long history of associating slavery, domination, and arbitrary rule in European political thought, since the ancients. Theologically, this account of slavery makes it, in a sense, the paradigm of sin as such. It is a violation of the First Commandment, elevating a human to a god-like position, and it names an impulse that turns people away from God since the beginning, since Eden.Ā
If this is the account of slavery we adopt, it creates limits to how widely the language of slavery can be applied, and it cautions us about the metaphorical use of slavery. This is counter-intuitive because I have also suggested that we can find slavery-like dynamics everywhere, in all people, at all times. We are slaves to sin. But that does not mean everything is slavery. It means that using the language of slavery draws our attention to particular dynamics, those illuminated by the picture we can draw of slavery in laboratory conditions.Ā
Ought we to use the language of slavery in contemporary cases of human trafficking? There is no question this is very bad behavior, and we should marshal resources at our disposal to stop itāso, as a matter of political practice, there is probably no need to be fussy about the language we use. (However, the fascination, even titillation, of a particular strand of Christianity with sex trafficking, sometimes described as āwhite slavery,ā is rather troubling.) On the other hand, as an analytical matter, and so as a matter of discerning the right responses to individuals involved in human traffickingāand as a matter of theologyāit is important to reflect on how well the language fits the circumstances.
As you can surely tell by now, I have worries about whether slavery is an apt language to describe sex trafficking. My main worry is quite simple. In empirical cases approaching laboratory conditions, slavery takes place in public. Indeed, the public nature of slavery seems essential: mastery is recognized not only by one particular enslaved person but by a whole community of the enslaved, and by a whole community of masters. In the case of human trafficking, however, secrecy is essential. The world at large cannot know that a certain person is a trafficker, that another person is being trafficked. Put another way, part of the harm of slavery is that it involves public degradation whereas part of the harm of human trafficking is that it involves public silencing. I think human trafficking is more productively labeled a species of abuse than a species of domination (although the language of abuse, especially in recent years, is itself used in confusingly loose ways).Ā
The contrast I am trying to make becomes clearer when we attend to the level of the individual will. In slavery, the will of the enslaved is suppressed, nearly stamped out entirely; all the enslaved person can desire is to fulfill the wishes of the master. The word of the master is a law that must be followed. In human trafficking, as adeptly portrayed by Gooding, the will of the trafficking victim becomes entangled with the will of her trafficker. She is, in a sense, seduced into willing her own entrapment. The trafficker, paradoxically, becomes a source of comfort, a private space of security set apart from the supposed dangers of the world. As Gooding demonstrates, a particular challenge that is not uncommon to encounter around human trafficking is former victims who become perpetrators themselves, who take up careers as mediators between traffickers and their victims. In such cases, the will of the trafficker and the trafficked are so entangled that the two roles become one. This is not a dynamic we find on a large scale as we approach paradigm cases of slavery.
Why does making such a conceptual distinction matter in responding to human trafficking? Goodingās book addresses a number of puzzles around human trafficking that put pressure on the slavery model, and in a sense the project of his book is to formulate responses that are needed because the standard responses to slavery fall short. To put it rather simplistically, what needs to happen in cases of slavery is to remove the master. Once there is no longer external pressure on the enslaved, the enslaved can regain her humanity, no longer subject to the whims of another. But, as Gooding points out, when those who have been trafficked are ostensibly freed, they often do not feel free. They feel scared. At a disconcerting rate, they return to those who trafficked them. They are often rejected by their families and communities. To regain their humanity, they need structure and stabilityācreating a poignant paradox that Gooding describes where freeing trafficking victims very nearly means enslaving them again, this time in highly-structured rescue homes.
Gooding frames his argument as deepening a slavery framework to accommodate the particular example of human trafficking in India, but I wonder if it would be more productive to abandon the slavery framework and turn instead to a framework of response drawn not from slavery but from abuse. There are quite robust and quite practical literatures on responding well to abuse, though they often focus on just one form of abuse: substance abuse, spousal abuse, child abuse, self-harm, or workplace abuse, for example. In each of these cases, there is an essential element of privacy. Morality and truth become distorted. And the abused victimās will is twisted around anotherās, or in on itself (in the case of self-harm and substance abuse), rather than suppressed. In each of these cases, we find dynamics similar to those Gooding identifies in human trafficking. That which causes harm also offers comfort, so ending abuse means a difficult separation and rebuilding new sources of community and so comfort. Similarly, in each of these cases it is widely recognized that there is something long-lasting about the way the personality is warped in abuseāas Alcoholics Anonymous puts it, once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.Ā
Particularly important, in a theological context, is the way that abuse transforms care into something pathological. Self-harm is understood as care for the self. The abusive spouse acts violently in the name of care for his partner. The abusive priestāwho is often portrayed as confusing himself with God, in the framework of domination and slaveryāoften presents himself as care-giver, particularly attentive to his victim, wanting the best for his victim. And so, too, in the cases that Gooding presents, something like care is part of the vocabulary of traffickers, but it is also part of the vocabulary of rescuers, of those who devote themselves to responding rightly to the evil that is human trafficking.Ā
Here is another point where sharpening our understanding of what is and what is not slavery pays off. Care does seem like the apt response to those who have been enslaved: we ought to identify and attend to their needs, to offer resources that open possibilities for flourishing. But in cases of abuse, where abuse and care are inextricable, a different orientation may be needed. The harm of abuse is confirmed and compounded by its privacy, so publicity is an essential element of response (rather than, say, the option to politicize harm once one is on the road to recovery). Publicity may mean public acts, but it may also mean building a community, a public, in which stories of abuse can be shared and recognized as such. All of these practices are mentioned by Gooding, but it strikes me as quite important to distinguish the practices and priorities that respond to slavery from those that respond to abuseāespecially when we are thinking with Christian non-profits that default toward an easy embrace of care, because it seems like love.
Theologically, slavery is about false gods while abuse is about atheism, about eliminating the possibility of relating to the divine. As the will is warped through the dynamics of abuse, the sense of a stable normative universe, and of a source of normativity, fades away. The enslaved can imagine a master of her master; for the abuse victim, the dynamic of abuse leaves no room for imagining otherwise. This is a challenge that theologians have not yet fully confronted but that is becoming urgent as harm is increasingly privatized, increasing taking the form of abuse. We know how to think beyond slavery, which plots naturally around death and resurrection, but we struggle to think beyond abuse.
I elaborate on this point in Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022.↩
9.25.24 | Christopher Gooding
Reply
Response to Vincent Lloyd
At the outset, I’d like to express my deep thanks to Drenda Landers, Amy Levad, Vincent Lloyd, Joerg Rieger, and Elizabeth Schick for readingĀ Beyond SlaveryĀ and taking the time to craft thoughtful responses. I’m thankful both for the appreciation that they showed for the book and for their criticism in those responses. Each responseāperhaps especially when criticalāāgave me the opportunity to discuss a topic that I either was not able to include inĀ Beyond SlaveryĀ or was not able to fully develop in the book.Ā And that opportunity to clarify my thinking is a gift in and of itself.ā
Vincent Lloyd is right to point out that not all things human beings have likened to slavery really are slavery. We do have a tendency to overstretch the category. Some agencies include both child marriage and organ harvesting under lists of practices that constitute āmodern-day slavery.ā Iām not an expert on either practice, but Iād exclude both child marriage and organ harvesting from āmodern slaveryā precisely because I donāt see how either includes an element of natal alienation or social death. So, I agree that there are things that people sometimes include in the category āmodern slaveryā that are ābad, but not slavery.ā
Further, I agree with Lloyd that there is āsomething distinctive about the trans-Atlantic slave trade that produces lasting effects and that is unlike other bad things humans do to each other.ā But does including human trafficking among the things we call āslaveryā detract from that distinctiveness? I donāt think that it does. After all, we admit that slavery was practiced in the Roman Empire and the Ancient Near East, even if those forms of enslavement were different in noteworthy ways from the trans-Atlantic slave trade (e.g. both were pre-capitalist slave systems, while the trans-Atlantic slave trade was a capitalist slave system). And that admission does not detract from our efforts to understand the distinctive harms of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. There are different species of enslavement, and we can still talk about the unique harms wrought by each species. For example, no one can argue that either modern human trafficking or Roman imperial slavery were a key component of the crucible in which the very identity marker we call āraceā was produced (along with its concomitant form of oppression, racism). But there are plenty of scholars who have very credibly made that argument about the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
In the end, Lloyd and I donāt seem to disagree much on what the core elements of slavery are, and we even seem to agree that slavery has very fuzzy borders. We just disagree about whether the core elements of slavery are present in trafficking cases. Lloyd names āseverance from language, family, culture, land, and religion, leaving the survivor to respond to the arbitrary will of their captorā as key elements of slavery. These elements are part of what Patterson called ānatal alienation,ā and they are there in trafficking cases: traffickers depend on the isolation of victims from these sources of support, comfort, and resistance to control them. Lloyd and I agree that ātheologically, slavery is about false godsā as masters try to claim godhood over the lives of those who are enslaved. Again, I was shocked at the times that my interviewees found this theological language more apt than clinical language to describe their captors. The one criteria Lloyd adds that I do not discuss in Beyond Slavery is that slavery must be public, not private. The problem here is that many trafficking cases are quite public. My interviewees attested to cases where a survivor ran away from their captor, and their captor approached the police and tasked them with recovering the runaway victim. And the police obliged. If a cop is willing to enforce it, I take it that your captivity is a public matter.
It is certainly true that we use the language of slavery in a metaphorical key so often that it can become completely unmoored from the on-the-ground realities that birthed the language in the first place. Which is why I want to focus on an instance in human trafficking cases where we suddenly find ourselves using the old language of slavery in a shockingly literal fashion. In many human trafficking cases, you can intervene by redeeming the person who has been trafficked. I donāt use the term āredemptionā figuratively here. I mean you can literally buy them back from their captor.
We are so used to using the term āredemptionā in a metaphorical sense that we often forget that the term even has a literal meaning (āto buy backā). In ancient systems of slavery, āredemptionā referred to the practice of going to a slaveholder and buying back a person they had enslaved, thereby securing their freedom. All the figurative uses of āredemptionā that we are more familiar with assume that socio-economic context. Thatās why atonement theories can talk about Christ redeeming us from sin or ransoming us from Satan (putting sin or Satan in the role of the slaveholder, humanity in the role of the enslaved, and Christ in the role of the person who liberates the enslaved by buying them back). Modern human trafficking cases have socio-economic conditions that are similar enough to ancient slavery that we suddenly find ourselves jarringly thrown from using the language of slavery in the metaphorical sense to using it in the literal sense, just like the ancients did. I canāt help but think that suggests that human trafficking really is a species of slavery. We just donāt have this experience when intervening in the other cases of abuse that Lloyd names (such as labor exploitation or parental abuse).
There are some important consequences of this metaphorical to literal shift. I never heard anyone ask, āIs redemption effective?ā or āIs redemption ethical?ā in any of my systematic theology classes, precisely because the metaphorical use of the term did not force us to consider the ethics of the actual social practice. In trafficking cases, advocates have been forced to ask such questions, and have turned to other instances of this discussion under other systems of slavery for guidance. One of the few books on the ethics of human trafficking intervention wrestles with exactly those two questions, with the center of gravity being a tentative affirmative answer to both.1 Indeed, more and more agencies are warming to the practice of redemption as they start to question the ethics and effectiveness of intervening in trafficking cases through police raids.2
Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martin Bunzl, Buying Freedom: the Ethics and Economics of Slave Redemption (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).↩
Bombay Teen Challenge (one of the organizations where I conducted my interviews) has long preferred to intervene in sex trafficking cases in Mumbai through redemption precisely because they distrust the local police. For more on this organization and on this topic, see Chris Gooding, āJudgment, Sex Trafficking and Bonded Labor.ā Found in D. Stephen Long and Rebekah L. Miles, eds. The Routledge Companion to Christian Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2022), 289ā99.↩