of violence and order—existed for disciplining race, with noted accentuation on pain and the “spectacle of power.”17 The visible Black body appeared on display for the sake of White pleasure and Black terror. In the moment that Black bodies met the subjugation of slavery, they simultaneously encountered the visual ordering of race. In written details about skin color, hair texture, and overall physicality, slavery theorized Black raciality as an observable phenomenon as early as the moment of purchase. Unfree Africans were often “graded” in the slave market, delineated as “Second Rate or Ordinary Men,” sometimes “Extra Girls or No. 1 Girls,” as “slave speculators” tried to rate the value of human cargo against other goods like cotton or sugar.18 Not only did these tactics assign fiscal value to Black bodies, but descriptions were part of an overall practice of closely examining unfree people. Scenes of subjection happened through both intimate and distant forms of social contact. The peculiarly ocular institution transformed the display of individual unfree people into a large-scale cultural practice of constant observation, prefiguring Black bodies and people of African descent as demanding surveillance. This approach to the visual imagined the Black body as intrinsically visible, as decipherable. The construction of vision and visibility in the context of slavery also organized Black raciality around an inherent need for management or oversight from Whites.
Ironically, although slavery’s visual matrix positioned Blackness as a visible phenomenon, this unreliable visual culture also projected unfree people of African descent as deftly capable of a sly invisibility. Mainstream belief in the idea of Black visibility happened in concert with a perpetual suspicion about unfree Blacks trying to escape. Although the coffle situated the Black body as an entity on view for the White eye/I, the ever-present possibility of escape also positioned unfree Black people as likely to avoid observation. This coupling imagined people of African descent as simultaneously easily observable and also requiring special techniques of visual policing. Black bodies were both hypervisible and yet capable of a certain invisibility. For example, in mid-eighteenth-century New York City, Whites in local government enforced laws requiring enslaved persons to be indoors after sundown or to carry candle lights (as well as explanatory passes) after dark; lawmakers made it illegal for an unfree Black (body) to be unlit after dark.19 The idea that technological intervention helped illuminate the Black body advanced the idea that without help, Black people could easily avoid White surveillance in the colonial United States. These social practices imagined that Black skin was able to evade visibility, or the White gaze, despite the way in which Black corporeality was thought of as uniquely palpable. Mandating Black illumination constructed Black skin as textured in such a way as to avoid visual faculties. Accordingly, slavery required surveillance and public vigilance against a deceptive Black visibility. Such beliefs fanaticized the Black body’s inherent ability to evade observation and its ability to deceive even the most astute White observer.
This condition of hypervisibility depended upon the suppression of a Black gaze. Although slavery constructed the Black body as deceptive, the matrix also construed unfree Black people as devoid of the ability to properly see, prefiguring them as visible objects that lacked the ability to consciously manipulate notions of visuality. The matrix of slavery’s peculiar visual culture meant to suppress the Black eye/I. In the daily practice of slavery, many Whites failed to recognize that enslaved Black people engaged in processes of observation, or that they monitored Whites’ behaviors. Likewise, the system of slavery failed to entertain the existence of an inner Black subject, with a sense of will, who realized her own mistreatment or violation.20 These social beliefs appear in records of unfree Black house servants who listened in on White people’s conversations.21 In this rubric, slavery’s atrocities happened to individuals who were supposedly unable to critically observe acts of sexual assault and kidnapping. When Whites did not presume that Black people were unable to cast a critical eye on the system of slavery, they demanded that unfree people look away. For example, if a bonded man or woman delivered the wrong kind of “look” toward a free White, such an offense was deemed disrespectful to the individual and to slavery’s power relations—a punishable crime in the state of Virginia.22 Whites socially mandated that people of African descent avoid issuing looks in service of the maintenance of slavery.
Accordingly, slavery’s peculiarly unreliable visual culture entailed a number of inconsistencies that helped maintain constant distinctions of race. African descendants could not avoid visibility, but the law required that they make themselves visible to White sight. Similarly, unfree Blacks inherently lacked any kind of critical perception, but the law forbade them from looking at Whites. The peculiar nature of visual culture in the context of slavery mimicked the strange nature of ocularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the presence of transatlantic slavery, “a deep belief in knowing by seeing” emerged as “key” to race relations.23 Cartesian dualism lent visual credence to its power structures, producing an unrelenting faith in the “disembodied eye” in popular culture as well as within intellectual discourses. Whereas within this “ontology of sight,” as described by Martin Jay, “the one who casts the look is always a subject and the one who is its target is always turned into an object,” ocularity within the context of the Enlightenment easily attached itself to philosophies of race and enslavement.24 The subjective “I” found its underpinning in the Cartesian “eye,” and thus the racialization of subjectivity also enlisted the visual. To put it differently, early ruminations on the eye/I always already trafficked in conceptions of race. Enlightenment theories of the visual were imbedded within the proliferation of slavery. The eye as dissociated from corporeality accommodated a larger context that severed Whiteness from the body. Similarly, emphasis on the utility value of the Black body or Blackness as pure embodiment rendered persons of African descent as devoid of ocular faculties. The construction of ocularity in the period of Enlightenment established the ability to see, or the state of being visual, as connected to raciality. Bodies prefigured as visible, and thus racialized, necessarily remained distant from any practices of looking. Slavery united the racial and the visual through everyday practices. These philosophical ruminations on the eye, perspective, and corporeality (as associated with Descartes) are not severed from the practices of slavery that they helped to facilitate. These racial distinctions within the visual neatly connected to the Cartesian notion of subjectivity, problematically parsing the individual into mind or body, eye or embodiment.
Although a number of laws and social practices emphasized the significance of the Black body and unfree Black people to the system of slavery, notions of the White eye were also fundamental to the inconsistent nature of this peculiar institution. Acts such as locating Africans for kidnapping and identifying individuals who were “strong” enough to withstand the Middle Passage constructed slavers as gifted in assessing bodies for subjugation. Particularly when it came to purchasing chattel, slavery demanded an expert White eye/I to examine the bodies of potential purchases. Yet, while it took a certain innate visual skill to choose people of African descent who were good investments, slavery’s marketplace actively existed as a place of illusions where Whites oiled unfree people to make them appear strong, fed Blacks enough to make them look healthy, and prodded them to seem joyous. Walter Johnson explains that “being a ‘good judge of slaves’” was an important attribute for southern White men, making “the inspection and evaluation of black slaves” a central part of social hierarchy and one’s “public identity.”25 The “White man’s” ability to “see” enslaved people was a notable skill, even as Johnson notes that Whites in charge of trading took care to physically alter Black bodies for sale, shaving beards, dying hair, feeding them fatty diets, and forcing them to dance.26 In the transactions of slavery, the Black body represented the terrain on which Whites attempted to trick other Whites, or to demonstrate their own expertise. The White eye/I could simultaneously exist as expert at the slave market, and as one who suffered deception there as well.
The investiture of Whiteness with exceptional visual abilities is one of slavery’s most peculiar offerings. The cultivation of Whiteness through the faculties of the eye represents a key element of slavery’s visual domination. Although “slavery operated behind a certain invisibility, as far as its European beneficiaries were concerned,” where European colonists could avoid visual encounters with enslaved peoples and colonized territories geographically removed from the empire, slavery also helped to render
