Mass and Velocity of Slavery Ch 7

[alice malice]

In the period when M&D is set, people, the enslaved,  the people who
enslaved others, others who were participants in slavery, observers,
and so on....experienced trauma and suffered, what today we call PTSD.
Frederick Douglass describes several traumatic episodes in his
narrative, the whipping of his aunt, the murder of man in a river, the
beating he took from White workers when a labor conflict erupted and
Blacks, free, and hired, were terrorized by the organized Irish labor
in the shipyards, the discovery of his dead Grandmother in a hut (he
also describes the common trauma of slave mothers and parents who were
torn apart, the rape of enslaved women, the severity with which
mulatto children were punished by their White fathers...etc...and
Harriet Jacobs  provides details on the trauma females endures and
Equiano of the Middle Passage...trauma and PTSD. And, yes, the suicide
rate was elevated for enslaved and for those who enslaved others.

But I would caution the comparison of slaver with war, imperial or
civil or whatever kind, or with genocide, or holocaust, not because
the trauma and PTSD are not comparable, they are, but because slavery
is a labor system, not a system of organized murder.
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l