Warren’s understanding of fungibility is ahistorical

Calvin Warren would pause here to reassert his claims about slavery—that slavery’s economic violence created and reaffirmed the white identity, and did so through the commodification of the slave into a fungible object. My argument against him is twofold. First: if we can trace the history of the moral schema that produced this fungibility, does that not mean that fungibility was invented, and can be uninvented? Is it not possible (not a universally recognized truth, but a possibility) that there is a way to unmake the schema that created whiteness and ritually sacrificed blackness? Perhaps Calvin Warren would argue that no, there is no way—because the black ontology is being perpetually sacrificed and destroyed, there is no way to stop that cycle. It is an endless feedback cycle, he would argue—and as it spins, it maintains its integrity (sacrifice and creation), and progresses forward, consuming each black ontology as each black baby is born. But here we can return to Kate Manne. Ignore Warren’s protestations for a moment, and consider the second part of my two-fold argument: even if the morality of agency schema brought about white identity, is it possible that black people have consistency rejected and fought off these assaults on their ontology? Is it possible that music, art, dance, religion, protest and defiance—all of which were rich traditions in slave culture—indicated a truth that white violence could not reach because it cannot understand? Here I would like to propose a new way to look at dehumanization: (de)humanization. The parentheses indicate liminal space between action and thought, the place where destruction and construction are in harmony. To de-humanize, to take away humanity, is an action. By definition, it is an action that can only be done to a human. To strip away humanity, the perpetrator must actually (like Manne suggests) recognize their victim as human. You wouldn’t call a monkey a “monkey!” as an insult because a) you recognize this to be a factual statement, and b) a monkey has no capacity to understand what an “insult” is, and cannot feel insulted. A person, especially a black person, can feel embarrassed, threatened, or degraded by being called a monkey. If slavers actually thought black humans were not humans—why build an ontology around (de)humanizing? How could that practice withstand the test of time: either it would have to stop, because black people were successfully denied humanity and there would be no more reason to (de)humanize, or the very attempts of de-humanization actually reaffirm the essential humanity possessed by each human.