The P's and Q's of Slavery

A slave owner cannot possibly be a complete human being: one of the questions on the survey we took at the beginning of the book. I disagreed, not because the existence of slave owners and the institution itself isn't indescribably terrifying, but because I usually don't buy into broad statements such as that. But there is so much inhuman about their actions that I find myself agreeing with the aforementioned broad statement.

Of course, everybody is a product of the society that they live in, but the lack of human empathy knocks the wind out of me. I know how easy it is to lose empathy and shade the world through your eyes only, and I will never say being holistically empathetic is easy (or even possible) in any way. But what the hell? There were hundreds of thousands of slave owners IN THE UNITED STATES ALONE and most never thought, "what if that were me?"

Then again who am I to look back on a high pedestal? As I said, they were just products of their time. Humans are born with an almost complete absence of empathy; it grows as they grow, but if a child is born into a slave-owning family in a racist society, it is highly unlikely they will challenge tradition as that is all they have known. Children are so malleable at that age. For example, Schoolteacher teaches his students to see slaves, like Sethe, as people who have predominantly animal characteristics. That kind of environment doesn't leave much breathing room.

This is complicated further by the Garners in Beloved. They are slave owners, but they have a abnormal attitude towards it. They don't allow corporal punishment. They share their food with their slaves. They listen to their slaves' concerns. They also happen to take away the freedoms of other humans.

"'What you want to know, Sethe?'
'Him and her,' I said, 'they ain't like the whites I seen before. The ones in the big place I was before I came here.'
'How these different?' he asked me.
'Well,' I said, 'they talk soft for one thing.'
'It don't matter, Sethe. What they say is the same. Loud or soft'" (30).

They may be nice about it, but the Garners are what they are: slave owners, oppressors, and racists (even if they listen to the slave's thoughts, the Garners are the ones with the control). It does not matter to me that they talk soft. The Garners cruelties may be less so, but they do nothing to challenge slavery. Their slaves' freedom is still nonexistent and that is their doing.