Slaveholders ‘very badly treated’

White people, we are told by the current master of Mar-a-Lago North, have been “very badly treated” by the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement, which he considers a form of “reverse discrimination.”

The movement led by such titans as Martin Luther King Jr., whose memory was marked Monday with parades and services across the U.S. on the national holiday in his honour, made it possible for white and Black people to play sports together, to eat together in restaurants and even to marry. By battling segregationists and taking on Jim Crow laws through mass protest, litigation and federal legislation, the movement also made it possible for Black people to get loans, enter schools and colleges from which they were formerly banned and even to vote (don’t worry, plans for widespread disenfranchisement in this year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential election are well in hand).

The Civil Rights Movement has radically curbed lynchings but enjoyed less success, of course, in deterring police killings of African American boys and men. Most unfairly of all as a result of this reverse discrimination, it has become harder, though not of course impossible, for rich landowners to get away with raping Black girls and women down on the farm. Whence will spring the valets of the future? Valets? We give you ... 1861. Even then, mind you, white grievance was a thing. For what, at bottom, have the MAGA movement and such antecedents as the John Birch Society and the KKK been about but restoring the United States of America to the white Christian nation both the slaveholding Founders and the Creator Himself intended:

It has become fashionable, in this anxious beginning to the year when the air itself seems to crackle with pamphlets and sermons and the moral electricity of other people’s opinions, to speak of the Southern slave owner as a figure of almost heroic endurance, a man so battered by history’s ingratitude that one wonders how he manages to rise from his four-poster each morning without assistance from an enslaved valet whom he insists on calling “family” (and an unacknowledged member of which the valet may very well be, from a strictly genealogical perspective).

The claim, advanced with great solemnity in drawing rooms and editorials, is that the slave owner has been treated very badly indeed, and that the real tragedy of our Republic is not bondage, nor the lash, nor the systematic conversion of human beings into movable property, but the emotional toll exacted upon those who must own such property and are increasingly made to feel, well, awkward about it.

Consider the position of the conscientious planter, who wakes each day to the intolerable burden of owning dozens or hundreds of people and then must endure the additional cruelty of being criticized for it. He is asked, by strangers and sometimes even by cousins from the North, to explain himself, to justify an arrangement that has worked perfectly well for generations provided one does not listen too closely to the people doing the work. This demand for explanation is itself framed as an assault, an invasion of privacy, as if the ownership of other human beings were a delicate personal habit, like taking laudanum before breakfast, and not a public system, or perhaps rather a sacred duty, upon which an entire economy has been erected.

What wounds most deeply, we are told, is the accusation of moral failing. The slave owner, who has never once doubted the righteousness of his position except perhaps in the fleeting moments between brandy and sleep, is suddenly confronted with the suggestion that he might be wrong. Wrong, not merely mistaken in a technical sense, but wrong in the way that stains one’s sense of self, like ink spilled across the soul. It is exhausting, this constant implication that profiting from forced labour might be less noble than previously advertised, and one can hardly blame the planter for feeling besieged, for experiencing himself as a victim of a national mood swing.

Nor should we underestimate the suffering involved in being cast as history’s villain before history has even finished clearing its throat. The slave owner is expected to carry on his shoulders the projected judgment of future generations, children not yet born who will, it is rumoured, look back upon him with something less than gratitude. This anticipatory shame is a heavy thing, and it arrives uninvited, like a draft through a poorly sealed window in an otherwise comfortable mansion. To be told, in advance, that your grandchildren’s textbooks may not speak kindly of you is a cruelty few could endure without protest.

There is also the matter of property rights, which are spoken of in the same hushed, reverent tones usually reserved for scripture. To interfere with a man’s property is to interfere with the very notion of liberty, and if that property happens to breathe, to speak, to harbour thoughts and fears and desires, well sir, that is an unfortunate technicality.

The slave owner, having invested heavily in this form of property, feels himself perpetually at risk, not from rebellion or violence or divine judgment, but from legislation, from the terrifying possibility that the government might one day decide that his investment is immoral and therefore invalid. Imagine the stress of such uncertainty, the way it gnaws at the nerves while one sits on the veranda, sipping lemonade poured by hands that are, legally speaking, not their own.

And then there is the social ostracism, subtle but unmistakable. Invitations grow cooler. Conversations turn tense. One senses, in the pauses between polite remarks, a quiet condemnation. The slave owner, accustomed to deference, now finds himself the object of something like disapproval, which is far worse than open hostility because it cannot be answered with a speech or a duel. It just sits there, unspoken, like a judgmental piece of furniture in the room.

All of this, we are assured, amounts to persecution. That the enslaved endure whips, families torn apart, the daily erasure of autonomy, is acknowledged in theory but quickly set aside as an unfortunate background detail, like bad weather during an otherwise successful harvest. The true drama, we are invited to believe, is the inner life of the master, his wounded pride, his sense of being misunderstood by a nation that owes him far more gratitude than it shows.

As the U.S. edges closer to something unnamed but unmistakably violent, this narrative of the mistreated slave owner grows ever more fervent, as if repetition might convert it into truth. One almost admires the audacity, the way suffering is inverted, like a map drawn upside down, so that those at the top appear crushed beneath the weight of those below.

Almost admires it, until one remembers whose descendants are actually bearing the weight, and whose scions and successors have the luxury of complaining about it.