Drowning Black Slaves for the Insurance Money: The Whitewashed History of the Zong Massacre and the New Movie 'Belle'

I am going to see the new movie, The Retrieval later today. I do so with some anxiety and trepidation as the movie tells the tale of a young black teenager who is used as bait by white slave hunters in order to capture free and runaway African-Americans during the Civil War.

I am less concerned about the historical veracity of such a tale than with the question of "why release this movie now?" And will The Retrieval be used as a weapon by those (racist) white Americans (and others) who scream "they did it to themselves!" when the crime against humanity that was centuries of white on black slavery and murder in the New World is made a topic of private or public conversation?

Film is a space where the collective subconscious negotiates its anxieties, hopes, dreams, and fears. Film is a projection, quite literally, of a society making sense of itself. Most important, film is about the present not the past.

Belle is also opening today. It is a beautiful period drama where it would appear that love conquers all, as the "mixed race" black child of a white nobleman tries to navigate her liminal racial existence in a Jane Austen-like period drama. Its trailer was shown before 12 Years a Slave. During my screening, the audience smiled, muttering in more than a low whisper that "they have to see Belle, it looks so wonderful and heartwarming".

12 Years a Slave was cinematic medicine; the trailer for Belle was a nice, light, tasty, treat. Americans love their junk food.

To my pleasant surprise, The Chicago Reader offered the following scathing review of Belle.

Written by Misan Sagay, this British historical drama is getting the "inspiring true story" treatment, though the inspiring parts aren't true and the true parts aren't inspiring. Dido Elizabeth Belle was the illegitimate child of an African woman and a white captain in the Royal Navy; deposited at the estate of her uncle, the esteemed jurist William Murray, Earl of Mansfield, she grew to young adulthood in social limbo, too low to dine with the family but too high to dine with the servants. Sagay turns her plight into a Jane Austen-style romance involving both sincere and scheming suitors, which allows the writer to unpack the social attitudes of the time. Her invented narrative works much better than the ensuing legal drama based on the 1781 Zong massacre, in which British slave traders tossed their sick slaves overboard; Murray ruled on the case as lord chief justice, and though the verdict is presented here as a blow against slavery, it was really a more mundane question of insurance law.

Sometimes, the truth does manage to assert itself.

The global slave trade gave birth to innovations in fields such as insurance, shipping, finance, medicine, engineering, and banking. The movement of millions of people through the Middle Passage, the human logs for the fires that created consumerism and global capitalism, was instrumental in making the modern world. 

Black human property was treated as objects, without apology or excuse-making by White government and society.

The website Understanding Slavery, offers the following details on the Zong affair:

Like other cargoes, the Africans on the Zong were insured by the ship's owners: each had a price on their head. It was also an accepted convention of English maritime insurance that, under certain conditions, compensation would be paid for dead Africans. Of those killed in the course of a shipboard insurrection (of which there were many) or who died of wounds, and even those thrown overboard during the crushing of a rebellion, each would have their value returned to the ship's owners by the underwriters.

This had been standard practice long before the Zong incident. Someone on board the Zong, moreover, clearly knew that maritime insurance allowed for such claims to be made. However, up to 1783, no one as far as is known had claimed for the death of Africans deliberately killed in order to make an insurance claim...

Almost as surprising was the decision by the Liverpool merchants – the William Gregson syndicate, two of whom had been mayor of Liverpool – to sue for their money in the first case. They were perfectly happy to go to court, with all the inevitable publicity, and openly admit that their crew had killed 132 Africans.

When the case was heard before Chief Lord Justice Mansfield, eminent counsel, notably the solicitor general John Lee argued vigorously that the killings were not a matter of murder or morality but solely involved a question of property and insurance: 

What is this claim that human people have been thrown overboard? This is a case of chattels or goods. Blacks are goods and property; it is madness to accuse these well-serving honourable men of murder. They acted out of necessity and in the most appropriate manner for the cause. The late Captain Collingwood acted in the interest of his ship to protect the safety of his crew. To question the judgement of an experienced well-travelled captain held in the highest regard is one of folly, especially when talking of slaves. The case is the same as if wood had been thrown overboard. 

However, even Lord Mansfield, generally sympathetic to the slaving lobby, felt uncertain about this line of reasoning. 

At one level, the Zong case was an extension of existing legal and commercial practice. Africans were bought and sold as property, and they were insured as property. If killed by the ship's crew in self-defence, their value was recoverable – as property. The Gregson syndicate went to court with this in mind: they were Liverpool slave traders who handled Africans as commodities – and they wanted their money back...

Yet the deliberate killings of Africans during voyages of slave ships did not end following the Zong. Indeed they actually increased in the early 19th century: When, following abolition of the slave trade in 1807, Royal Navy vessels chased suspected illegal slave ships, the slavers' crews were often prepared to throw Africans overboard rather than be caught with slaves on board and have the vessels impounded.

The racial tyranny of white on black chattel slavery does not have to be exaggerated or turned into a bogeyman myth in order to force moral objection or disgust. The matter of fact, day-to-day, quotidian nature of white supremacy is wicked--and this wickedness (and the struggle against it) shaped American democracy and Western society's past and present. Moreover, the routine evil of white supremacy under the slave regime--and then Jim and Jane Crow in the United States--is, to my eyes, its most disturbing aspect.

Simon Legree, the KKK or snarling slavers and overseers are easy to conjure up as examples of white supremacy: their evil is obvious. The accountant for the plantation, a respectable businessman who made money on the slave trade, or the young couple who received a slave (or two) as a wedding gift is evidence of moral rot on a grand scale. They are not evil outliers. Rather, they are "regular people" doing what "normal people" did in a slave society.

That foundational evil is inconvenient and denied--American exceptionalism views it as a mere inconvenience except when it can be truncated and spun in such a way as to elevate the greatness and virtue of the (white) American people.

[For example, the deflections that are used to deny the fact of white racism and the continuing impact of slavery on black Americans in the present by conservatives almost inevitably end with some reference to how white people fought a Civil War to end the peculiar institution. Consequently, black people should shut up, be grateful, and stop complaining so much].

The white racial frame shifts reality, rewrites history, and legitimates a type of white situationism where the latter is made into a universal truth and a unifying perspective, as opposed to one point of view that is often wrong, distorted, and based on a series of interdependent lies.

White supremacy does not involve lying only to black and brown people about a deficit in the latter groups' intelligence, self-worth, and humanity. White supremacy also lies to white people, both overtly and covertly, about their inherent "normality", and thus de facto superiority, over people of color.

In responding to the white participants in her "brown eyes blue eyes" experiments who become upset at being treated in a "mean" way, anti-racist activist Jane Elliot famously said that white racism is everywhere, black and brown people can't even go outside or turn on the TV without having to confront it...complaining white people who can't tolerate being "black" for ten minutes need to grow up.

Belle is the white racism of the Hollywood lie, where inconvenient truths are ignored in order to tell a fanciful, indulgent story of love across the color line.

In post civil rights America, one of the biggest lies of Whiteness is the story of interracial reconciliation because it lets white folks off of the hook because they read themselves into the text as heroic saviors, otherwise decent bystanders to history, or where they, as "good" people, find validation in being juxtaposed against the racist white villains offered up as easy sacrifices on the post civil rights era alter of colorblindness and "diversity".

Real justice involves pain and material sacrifice. Hugs and nice words and cinematic melodrama do none of that necessary work. White fantasies tell white lies to white folks and people of color too: life is easier that way. The real world, the empirical fact of how race still over determines life chances in American society, is nurtured by such trite cinematic fantasies.