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Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers opens her stunning new book, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, with a story about Martha Gibbs, a sawmill owner in Mississippi who also owned “a significant number of slaves.” One of them, Litt Young, described her owner as a woman in total control of her financial affairs, including the management of her enslaved workers. Young remembered, for example, how Gibbs’ second husband tried and failed to convince her to stop ordering her overseer to administer “brutal whippings.” After the Confederates surrendered, Gibbs “refugeed:” She took some of her enslaved workers to Texas, at gunpoint, and forced them to labor for her until 1866—“one year after these legally free but still enslaved people ‘made her first crop.’ ” Then, writes Jones-Rogers, “Martha Gibbs finally let them go.”
Early books about female slaveholders, written in the 1970s and 1980s by historians of women’s experiences, tended to be about elite, wealthy Southerners who fell into that role when their husbands or fathers died. The women in these histories were depicted as having had a conflicted relationship with their role as slaveowner, and some historians posited that these plantation mistresses themselves were restricted and oppressed by the patriarchal society of the Old South. In this telling of history, the women who owned people didn’t directly involve themselves with the day-to-day management of enslaved workers, and certainly not with the selling and buying of the enslaved.
It’s these assumptions about female slaveowning as a kind of passive, half-hearted practice that Jones-Rogers is challenging with her book—and with them, the idea that white women were innocent bystanders to the white male practice of enslavement. Her goal, she told me in a phone interview, was to paint a picture of the way white women economically benefited from their own slaveholding. For some women, slaveholding helped them attract husbands. Within their marriages, a woman like Martha Gibbs who owned enslaved people might retain a measure of independence by maintaining control of “her” slaves. And if those husbands died, or turned out to be failures at business, their wives figured out ways to retain the human property that would ensure their continued material security.
Jones-Rogers began this shift in historical perspective by looking away from letters and diaries of elite white women that formed the documentary basis for earlier histories, and toward the testimony of the people who had been in bondage. Looking at life narratives of formerly enslaved people recorded during the Great Depression by the Works Progress Administration (Litt Young’s was one of these), Jones-Rogers found multiple instances of these witnesses naming the women who owned them—not simply as “mistresses” but as owners, with everything that entailed. She found stories of times when these women “reinforced their property claims in conversations with or in the presence of their slaves” and “challenged their male kinfolks’ alleged power to control their property, human or otherwise.”
Examining other kinds of records, Jones-Rogers found female slave-owners all over the archive of American slavery: female authors of the advertisements placed in newspapers when enslaved people ran away, identifying themselves as the runaways’ owners; women awarded compensation for the deaths of enslaved people who had been executed or sold away after being found guilty of fomenting insurrection; women compensated by cities who hired enslaved workers for public works projects. Married women, who under the legal doctrine of coverture were not commonly allowed to hold property once they had husbands, petitioned courts to gain economic rights to the enslaved people they had owned before marriage—and judges often agreed with their pleas.
The stories from WPA narratives show that from the perspective of the enslaved, female slaveholders weren’t much different from their male counterparts. Many of them were just as physically cruel as men, and they didn’t hesitate to make decisions to “sell away” enslaved people or their relatives. Stories of women who whipped enslaved people with nettleweed or fed enslaved children spoiled meat, and an entire heartbreaking chapter about the practice of separating enslaved women from their infants so that they could act as wet nurses for their mistresses’ offspring, make it clear that Southern women who owned people weren’t kind “mothers” making the best of a bad situation. “If we look carefully at slave-owning women’s management styles, we find that these differed little from those used by slaveholding men—and they rarely treated enslaved people as their children,” Jones-Rogers writes.
“When we find out women can be just as vicious and atrocious, it’s very disillusioning. Because who else is left?” — Stephanie Jones-Rogers
“I was thinking about the chapter about wet-nursing in relationship to Trump’s policies on separating women from their children,” Jones-Rogers said. “I saw an interview with this white couple in Texas, a part of Texas that was close to the border. And they asked the woman, how would you feel if these were your children? And she essentially said, ‘These wouldn’t be my children.’ ” The woman who forced WPA interviewee T.W. Cotton’s mother to breastfeed her own infant, leaving infant Cotton to be fed “animal milk or pap from a bottle, a dangerous practice that many physicians strongly discouraged at the time,” as Jones-Rogers writes, probably didn’t view this rupture as emotionally or physically difficult for the mother or the son. “When these women separated enslaved mothers from their children, they aren’t seeing themselves in that situation,” Jones-Rogers said. “They’re seeing themselves as vastly different from these women, and they’re seeing their relationships to their children as starkly different from their own.”
To some (let’s be honest, probably mostly white) people, the fact that white women have the capacity to inflict violence and to cruelly manipulate the lives of others—to be what Jones-Rogers, in our conversation, called “evil and dastardly”—is an eternal revelation. That’s why we still get curious, “look at this weird phenomenon” articles about white women at Unite the Right, or within the alt-right movement. Or why we need to be reminded again and again that white women gleefully attended lynchings, flocked in the thousands to formauxiliaries for the Ku Klux Klan, and avidly protested school integration in the South and the North. This history of slave-owning women’s economic relationship to slavery, Jones-Rogers says, should “remove the surprise.” “If you think about the value, the importance of whiteness in their lives, being a source of power, being a source of empowerment and emboldenment, then throughout history these little things make sense,” she said. “Women can hold their own when it comes to violence.”
Perhaps it’s a particularly American tic to want to believe in white women’s innocence in the cruelty of American history. Jones-Rogers reports that when she would present her work to scholars in Europe, they’d be unsurprised at its contents. “There was this kind of consensus among them that women could do these things. But when I talked to American historians, and American scholars, they were saying—‘What??? Wow!’ ”
While writing her book, Jones-Rogers read Hitler’s Furies, Wendy Lower’s history about Nazi women’s participation in genocide on the Eastern Front during World War II. “One of the arguments Lower makes is, the reason why we may be shocked is, we hold onto this hope that at least one half of humanity still has some good in it,” Jones-Rogers says. “We need some part of humanity to have this inherent, natural empathy. When we find out women can be just as vicious and atrocious, it’s very disillusioning. Because who else is left?”
The endYes, I know my friend was absolutely wrong in calling him a bundle of sticks.
Black dude voting for Trump and calling people ****. You setting yourself up even associating with that clown.
The begpackers are travellers, usually westerners, who travel to countries where the cost of living may be cheaper (often in Southeast Asia). Once there, to continue their journey, they beg, busk, sell hugs, postcards…
(CNN) A Colorado man accused of beating the mother of his child to death with a baseball bat tried to persuade his new girlfriend to kill her three times before he took the matter into his own hands, according to court testimony.
Patrick Frazee will face a murder trial in the death of his fiancée, Kelsey Berreth. Her body has not been found since she vanished Thanksgiving Day near Woodland Park, a city between Denver and Colorado Springs.
The couple's 1-year-old daughter, Kaylee, is in the custody of Berreth's parents.
Kelsey Berreth was last seen on Thanksgiving Day.
Idahoan Krystal Lee Kenney told investigators she was in a romantic relationship with Frazee last year, and he allegedly asked her to kill Berreth on three different occasions, Gregg Slater, an agent for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, testified Tuesday at a preliminary hearing in Cripple Creek, Colorado.
Kenney said she was not involved in the fatal attack, but the suspect ordered her to clean up the victim's home afterward, Slater said.
Slater testified that Kenney provided details of the November 22 killing during an interview with investigators. Kenney pleaded guilty to evidence tampering on February 8.
Initial Plan Allegedly Involved Poisoned Coffee
Investigators revealed grisly new details about the killing and what steps the two allegedly took to cover it up.
Frazee and Kenney started an intimate relationship in early 2018, she told investigators. He allegedly concocted a plan to kill Berreth, whom he accused of being abusive to their child and using drugs.
His first plan in September involved Kenney poisoning a caramel macchiato drink and giving it to Berreth, but she could not bring herself to do it, Slater testified.
Kenney bought the drink and took it to Berreth's townhome. When she opened the door, Kenney introduced herself with a false name, made up a story about just having moved to the area and gave her the drink, but it was not poisoned, she told investigators.
The second and third alleged attempts happened the next month. The first of those would involve Kenney assaulting the woman in the parking lot of her condo with a metal pipe, Slater testified. She waited for Berreth but still couldn't do it, Slater said. The third alleged attempt was to beat Berreth with a baseball bat, and again she refused, he said.
Frazee took matters into his own hands and killed Berreth with a baseball bat at her home on Thanksgiving Day, according to Slater's testimony.
The suspect allegedly killed Berreth by wrapping a sweater around her head and bashing her with the bat. He later burned her body in a water trough, according to testimony at Tuesday's hearing.
He asked Kenney to come and clean up the blood in the victim's home after the attack, and she brought a box of latex gloves, a white suit, booties, bleach, two trash bags and a hair net, Slater said. Frazee even asked her to look for a tooth near a vent, the agent said.
He had Thanksgiving Dinner After Attack, According to Testimony
Frazee was arrested in December on murder charges and is being held without bond.
Prosecutors filed new charges against him Tuesday, including tampering with a body and counts related to a crime of violence. In addition to those charges, Frazee faces two counts of first-degree murder and three counts of solicitation to commit murder in the first degree.
Frazee tried to enlist Kenney to dispose of the body in Idaho, but she refused, according to Slater. Instead, he removed the body to a farm in Fremont County, where it was left in a black tote bag in a stack of hay while he went to Thanksgiving dinner, Slater testified.
The suspect later moved the body to a water trough and added gas and wood before setting it ablaze, Slater said. Frazee allegedly scooped up the remains and disposed of them either at a dump or in a river.
"You don't know how hard it is to have Thanksgiving dinner after killing her," Kenney recalled Frazee telling her, according to Slater.
Cleanup of the Crime Scene
On November 22, Frazee called Kenney and told her he needed help cleaning up a mess in Colorado, according to Slater.
Krystal Lee Kenney has pleaded guilty to evidence tampering.
She drove overnight to Colorado, bringing cleaning equipment with her. She picked up a key at Frazee's home and opened the door at Berreth's townhouse to what she described as a "horrific" scene, Slater testified. She spent hours cleaning, discarding blood-stained toys and other items.
In early December, investigators examining Berreth's bathroom found blood in the toilet, the bathtub exterior, the bottom of a trash can, the walls, floor, a towel rack, the vanity and an electrical outlet, according to Slater.
Slater testified the blood matched a DNA profile created with samples taken from the Berreth family.
Parents Point to a Possible Motive
Berreth's parents, Cheryl-Lee Ellen Berreth and Darrell Lynn Berreth, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Frazee and cited a custody dispute as a likely a motive in their daughter's death. They said the suspect wanted full custody of their granddaughter, but Berreth would not agree.
Frazee told police he last saw his fiancée on November 22 when he picked up their daughter, making him the last known person to report seeing her alive.
would you prefer your own?
no cuz i like being colored and cultured. i'd rather sacrifice 'white privilege' than sacrifice color-culture and everything that comes with it.
i have access to white privilege when i need it
but if i were white i wouldn't have access to cultural benefits
Friday is 4/20— a day of stoner jokes, and, yes, lighting up. And with the recent legalization of marijuana in states like Vermont and California, it’s going to be an even happier holiday for some. But one thing that may get lost amid the smoke is that there is still an ongoing war on drugs that disproportionately targets people of color.
Research shows that there’s a clear racial discrepancy in who is arrested for marijuana possession, and that discrepancy even exists in states that have legalized marijuana.
As of January, weed is currently legal in nine states and Washington, DC. But laws still exist in some of these states that bar public consumption of marijuana, ban marijuana sales, and prohibit marijuana use for people under 21. A recent report by the pro-legalization Drug Policy Alliance found that even as arrests in states that legalized pot decline for black and white people, black people are still more likely to be arrested.
Marijuana legalization hasn’t ended racial disparities in arrests
Take Colorado, one of the first states to legalize pot back in 2012, and the first state to allow recreational marijuana sales in 2014. According to a 2016 report from the Colorado Department of Public Safety, the arrest rate for black people for weed-related offenses is still nearly three times that of whites. While marijuana arrests in general have decreased, this hasn’t affected all groups equally. “The decrease in the number of marijuana arrests by race is the greatest for White arrestees (‐51%) compared to Hispanics (‐33%) and African‐Americans (‐25%),” the report notes.
As Vox’s German Lopez has explained, these disparities exist in other states that have legalized marijuana and reflect the presence of racial bias in the criminal justice system. The difference isn’t explained by black and white marijuana use rates, since surveys show that black and white Americans use the drug at similar levels. But that data didn’t stop a Republican legislator in Kansas from arguing earlier this year that black people respond “the worst” to marijuana “because of their character makeup, their genetics.”
There is a concern that the recent wave of legalization will leave black Americans behind.
Racial justice activists, many of them black women, argue that for real change to occur legalization must include a change in how drug laws are enforced by police officers, and have incorporated the issue into the broader conversation about race and policing. And black people are also working to increase their presence among those starting marijuana businesses in states that allow sales.
“As white people exploit the changing tide on marijuana, the racism that drove its prohibition is ignored,” Vincent M. Southerland, executive director of NYU Law’s Center on Race, Inequality and the Law, and Johanna B. Steinberg of the Bronx Defenders recently wrote for the New York Times. “So are the consequences for black communities, where the war on drugs is most heavily waged.”
my b i didnt mean would u trade your ethnicity for white privilege
i meant would you prefer if you didnt have to depend on white ppl for their white privilege beause you have your own as your own ethnicity?
i dont think that's even possible because ppl find different ways to discriminate all the time, just look at homogenous populations where everyone in t hat society is white, or everyone in xyz society is the same color/ethnicity/culture or whatever, yet discriminate each other by region, class, sub-culture, etc.
so even if i had "white-privilege" or whatever equivalent in addition to what i already am, that would mean a lack of inequality based on color, which would be replaced with a surplus of inequality in another form IMO.
yea i get it itd be eye color or hair length or height whatever
but so in essence, in the current form of inequality in which white privilege exists, do you think it is preferable that you as an individual benefit from white privilege through your friends versus if your friends had to benefit through you?
like you can be happy to benefit but do you think it is more equitable to the greater number of disadvantaged people outside of you?
i mean am i to assume that we as minorities should all seek white friends to be as privileged as you are (with your white friends)?
repped for the insightful response and not taking my questions as an attack