Spot The Slave Rebellion

Last Wednesday, April 6, was the anniversary of the 1712 New York Slave Rebellion, the largest in the history of the American colonies. Around two dozen slave-domestics set fire to a building in New York City and then ambushed the white authorities who came to put the fire out, slaughtering nine. The African-born rebels hoped their massacre would lead to a large-scale slave uprising.

They were tragically wrong. Not a single slave came to their aid. The oppressors stuck together, while the oppressed hung each other out to dry-a depressingly common yet little-recognized phenomenon in American history.

Six of the slave rebel leaders committed suicide. Thirteen were hanged, one was left to die in chains without food or water, three were burned to death and one was left racked and broken on the wheel.

To the horrified colonials, the slaughter made no sense except as a random act of indescribable evil. This is evident when, in April 1741, an alleged slave plot to burn down New York City was "uncovered." One hundred fifty-four blacks and 24 whites were arrested; 31 blacks were executed. One of the participating judges, Daniel Horsmanden, described the conspiracy as, "a Roman Catholic plot, as a monstrous instance of ingratitude towards kindly white masters who had retrieved these Negroes from the heathen barbarism of Africa," and as a "revelation of the inherent baseness of Negroes in general."

In answer to the question "Why?" all causes were cited, no matter how irrelevant, except the most obvious source of the plotters' rage: slavery. The whites at the time were simply incapable of fathoming the possibility that slavery caused slave rebellions.

Readers might be shocked by our forefathers' grotesque myopia, but in fact a penchant for holistic self-delusion is one of the enduring features of American culture and piety. Rather than take the middlebrow route and merely judge the colonials, we should recognize that there still exist all kinds of unbearable oppressions today that we are likewise incapable of acknowledging.

One way to spot unrecognized oppression is to measure the degree of cultural delusion used to explain outbreaks of violence. The Iraqi rebellion was variously blamed on foreign terrorists, a few dead-enders, and later, ungrateful Iraqis-everything but the American invasion and occupation. Nine-eleven was blamed, with a straight face, on "evil folks" who "hate us because we are free." And, as I pointed out last week, in the case of school shootings, everything-Nazism, violent video games, lax gun laws, a culture of fear-is blamed for school shootings, except the most obvious suspect: schools.

Some of these delusional explanations are already starting to seem comically dated. But we're not ready to go so far as sympathizing with today's murderers the way we do the rebels of 1712. After all, our situation today is so much different.