November 11

    This week we discussed the autobiography of a slave and the slave trade. I found the question of resistance and assimilation the hardest thing to answer. We were asked if we thought people in a certain situation were resisting or assimilating. I believe that this question is impossible for us to answer simply because we have no idea what intentions and meaning the individual had by their actions. On top of that some actions could have been assimilation as well as resistance, for instance Manzanos action of spending a lot of time learning household tasks like sewing and cooking. This could be argued as assimilation because he is bettering his skills to help his master, or it could be argued as resistance because he is mastering this that will help him after he gets out of slavers. We can go back and forth on this matter all day but the reality of it is that we can never answer whether it was assimilation or resistance because we don’t know what Manzano was thinking when he was learning these skills.

    Another thing that I feel was greatly overlooked in our discussion is the instinct of survival. We were going back and forth on whether actions taken by the slaves were either assimilation or resistance but what if it wasn’t either and was just survival. For example, the slaves eating out of the food troughs can be seen as assimilation because they were accepting their role as a slave, however, survival instincts might have had more of a play in that choice than logic. If someone was starving and was given food they probably wouldn’t question or consider the meaning of the container the food was coming in as much as those who are not starving. Though I am not them so I do not know what thoughts the slaves had, but I feel that if I were in that situation I wouldn’t think, “I accept becoming a slave and my dehumanization as I eat out of this trough.” No, I probably wouldn’t be thinking about anything but, “I’m hungry, scared and I need food.”

Comments

  1. Professor StarkNovember 12, 2021 at 8:14 AM

    Thank you, Victoria, for the post. You have raised a good point in that we cannot know what a person's motives for action are in the past, especially slaves who left no written record of their actions. The idea of survival instinct is well-taken and should be considered. Too often we are quick to assign a motive to another person's actions and the motive might well be survival.

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  2. Joseph GreendykNovember 12, 2021 at 9:57 AM

    Hi Victoria! I totally agree that it can be really hard to tell whether actions were resistance, assimilation, or just survival instincts. There seems to be such a gray area where what the slaves were doing may not have been just one or the other. When humans are put in such awful conditions, often times they are more focused on trying to survive one day to the next because the brain automatically switches to survival mode.

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