The social death thesis is wrong – preservation of culture and resistance proves the fact that enslaved Africans maintained identity and sought autonomy.

As stated earlier, the main premise to Wilderson’s argument for Afro-pessimism derives from the work done by Orlando Patterson between the relationship between slavery and the condition of social death for the Black Body. Thus, because of this condition of social death, Wilderson believes that the Black Body is incapable of accessing the law through legal reform and progress because of the way they are marked ontologically as the Slave. However, historian Vincent Brown has uncovered evidence with regards to the experience of slavery and social death when he writes, “The premise of Orlando Patterson’s major work, that enslaved Africans were natally alienated and culturally isolated, was challenged even before he published his influential thesis, primarily by scholars concerned with “survivals” or “retentions” of African culture and by historians of slave resistance. In the early to mid-twentieth century, when Robert Park’s view of “the Negro” predominated among scholars, it was generally assumed that the slave trade and slavery had denuded black people of any ancestral heritage from Africa. The historians Carter G. Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois and the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits argued the opposite. Their research supported the conclusion that while enslaved Africans could not have brought intact social, political, and religious institutions with them to the Americas, they did maintain significant aspects of their cultural backgrounds. For these scholars, the preservation of distinctive cultural forms has served as an index both of a resilient social personhood, or identity, and of resistance to slavery itself. Scholars of slave resistance have never had much use for the concept of social death. How could they have formed the fragile families documented by social historians if they had been “natally alienated” by definition? Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, if slaves had been uniformly subjected to “permanent violent domination,” they could not have revolted as often as they did or shown the “varied manifestations of their resistance.” (Brown, Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery, pg. 11-13). Patterson’s major theme regarding the social death of slaves is that, since birth, they have been unable to engage in the kind of social relations they desired because their status as fungible objects meant that those relations were always at the discretion of their masters. However, as Brown points out, Patterson, and subsequently Wilderson, have ignored that there were experiences free from the watchful eyes of the master. Furthermore, in the context of Wilderson, the fact that there remains to be evidence that slaves had preserved a distinct culture, than this would indicate that they retained some of their culture from Africa after the Middle Passage, the event that erased Black ontology for Wilderson. To put in bluntly, Africans did not come out of the Middle Passage as Blacks, but came out with some form of their culture still left intact, a culture, that, for Brown, still grew and developed in its own way even during the atrocities of slavery. If Wilderson’s main argument for the ontological death of the Black Body is because of their incapacity to develop their own subjectivity, then the formation of a distinct slave culture would invalidate this argument because the formation of a distinct culture shows that the Black Body still retained some capacity to form their own subjectivity, a sign of life in the ontological realm. Furthermore, if the Black Body were truly ontologically dead in the present, then statistics would indicate otherwise. A study by the Journal of Blacks in Higher education shows that since 1990, the graduation rate for Black men has improved from 28% to 35% in 2005 and subsequently 34% to 46% for Black women during the same period. The study does conceded that the statistics remain low, but that the progress made in the past 15 years has been encouraging and that reform has been a step in the right direction. If the Black Body were truly socially dead, then institutions such as the university would be completely inaccessible to the Black Body, yet the progress made in graduation rates show that the Black Body still has some agency and capacity to shape their own futures.