Lucretia Mott and I agree: Humans cannot be owned.

I have always been deeply uncomfortable with the discussion of slavery, and how every person and scholar still use the labels 'slave' and 'owner.' It's strange to me that even the most anti-slavery/anti-racists of scholars (that I've been exposed to) still use these terms. Because, to me, just because someone says that they 'own' another person, doesn't mean it's true. You can't 'own' a person.

(Although, I acknowledge the fact that this is semantics, and if you say you own someone, and, through threats of violence, you do control that person, then it does seem that you do, in fact, own them, at least in the very practical sense of the word.)

I've never really articulated this uneasiness before, and I didn't have any preferred alternative terms (as I hadn't really tried to figure any out). But, this morning on my drive to work, I was listening to a New Books Network podcast (as I do on most of my commutes)- Lillian Barger interviewing Carol Faulkner of Syracuse University on her book Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) (And which I really want to read). In it, Faulkner was talking about how Mott was a passionate and a very active abolitionist, and was extremely rigid in her beliefs, even when that resulted in some pretty cold attitudes/actions.

Like me, Mott, too, did not believe that people could be owned. To that end, she refused to participate in the buying and freeing of slaves (which many abolitionists of her day did), even opposing the purchasing and freeing of Frederick Douglas (!!!), because she believed that, in participating in the purchasing of people, even to free them, meant participating in the idea that it was even possible to own a human, which she straight up disagreed with utterly and totally. Faulkner even said that when a former slave showed up at a meeting of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, asking for funds to purchase his son, she told him no, and discouraged others from contributing. She believed that those who were enslaved, should escape. They did not need to purchase their freedom, because they are human beings, not objects. Not property.

Now, I certainly would have given every cent I had to the man asking to buy/free his child (unless I was in a position to help him escape otherwise), but at the same time, I do understand, and mostly respect where she is coming from. She is more rigid than I am, or would have been (though I would have been extremely active in helping escaped slaves more than supporting the idea of buying freedoms), but I think that was the first time, strangely, that I heard someone else say, essentially "The institution of slavery? F#*k that. They are people being held prisoners by captors, and we should help them escape, and ban the practice of capturing people and controlling them with violence. They are not property or ownable just because money is exchanged in the trading of these captured bodies." Those are my words, formed while listening to this interview, but very well illustrative of both my and Lucretia Mott's stance, I think.

It's so strange to think that I can't remember coming across this specific idea/stance before. I am quite active in both anti-racist and history circles, and slavery and the abhorrent wrongness is something I hear talk about constantly.. but sometimes things are just said in a slightly different way that leads to that lightbulb moment.

So, this is my declaration of semantic change: I'm going to try to no longer use the terms 'slave' or 'owners' whenever possible, but switch them out for, I think, 'captives'-- maybe prisoners? But that seems to implicate possible wrongdoing on their part, and they aren't quite prisoners of 'war'. Prisoners of capitalism? Prisoners of greed? Hmm. Maybe I'll stick with captives for now. And I will call a spade a spade and those that called themselves slave-owners, are 'captors'. I wish that word had more of a connotation with violence, but it's the best word I know of now.

I don't know much about linguistics/psychology, but there must be the idea that how you talk about things matter, and 'slavery' and 'slave-owners' are such common terms, that they almost.. reinforce the legitimacy of the institution, even when speaking against it.

So, these are my thoughts from this mornings commute. If anyone knows of anyone else who has written or spoken on these ideas, please let me know in the comments! I know I'm certainly not the only person who feels this way, and I'd love to find out what sort of language others have used to talk about this.