This is a thought experiment in two parts.
Here’s the first.
It’s 1942, and a small group of Jewish prisoners at Dachau have stolen some surplus weapons from a shed when the guards weren’t looking, and the door was unlocked.
They’ve hidden the guns near the outer edge of the property and devised a plan to escape. They know they may be captured or killed, but they also know they cannot live another day in captivity in this hellish place.
They only need to kill two guards before making a run for it. The two take a smoke break every night at the same time outside the barracks where the plotters are being held. So as not to alert others, the conspirators have fashioned potatoes into makeshift silencers intended to muzzle the sound of gunfire.
It may not work, but they have nothing to lose.
Now, a few questions.
- Would it be moral for them to kill the guards to escape their bondage?
- If so, and presuming they escape into the surrounding communities, would it be moral for them to kill additional Germans who might confront them?
- If so, which Germans? Just Nazi soldiers? How about regular German citizens? After all, they might report them to authorities, resulting in their arrest.
- If it might be acceptable for them to kill even non-soldiers, are there any civilians they could not morally kill if confronted by them? Women? Teenagers? Keep in mind: any of these could expose them and turn them in. So how young must a child be before they no longer pose the kind of threat that would make them a legitimate target?
Now put those questions — and your answers — to the side for a second. We’ll come back to them.
Here’s part two.
It’s 1851 in Virginia. An enslaved Black man, his wife, and two children have decided tonight is the night. They can abide their captivity no longer and would rather die than remain the property of another.
The wife has managed to steal a sharp knife from the kitchen where she works on the plantation. Tonight, her husband will wield it to kill the so-called master of the house in his bed, hoping to effectuate his and his family’s escape.
Now, a few questions:
- Would it be moral for him to kill the plantation owner to allow him and his family to escape bondage?
- If so, would it also be moral for him to kill the owner’s wife, who sleeps next to him, to keep her from alerting other family or overseers who may seek to capture or kill the enslaved persons trying to escape?
- If so, what about the couple’s teenage son, who sleeps down the hall? After all, he could alert authorities to what had happened, making the enslaved persons’ capture more likely. And if he is left alive, and the runaways are caught but not killed, he would take ownership of them now that his parents were dead.
- If the escapees could morally kill the teenage son, is there any age at which the plantation owner’s kids would be too young to justify killing them? Remember, at any age, the children would stand to inherit them as property should the runaways be caught and allowed to live. Thus, couldn’t it be legitimate for the enslaved to kill everyone in the house?
- Presuming they managed to escape the plantation, prior to them reaching a free state, would it be moral for them to kill additional white persons who confronted them, just to be safe and minimize the likelihood of being captured and re-enslaved?
In the first scenario, except for the most ridiculous pacifist — the kind who would prefer a home intruder kill them than for them to kill the intruder — most everyone would agree: prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp would be morally justified in killing guards to escape.
In fact, most would probably say that prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp would have been morally justified in killing guards just on principle.
To make a point.
Hell, for fun.
And I suspect that the vast majority — not all, but most — would say that having escaped, those runaways would have been justified in killing other Germans they encountered given the threat those Germans would pose.
Sure, it would be wrong to seek out Germans to murder for sheer revenge. But if, while trying to avoid detection, these Jews were confronted by some random hausfrau?
Gute nacht for her, too, without hesitation.
Same with kids, given that they might well be Hitler Youth and pose a mortal threat to the freedom and even lives of these runaways.
In short, in the scenario involving Jews escaping Nazis, most would endorse the idea of homicidal violence by the captives, and not merely because they might be murdered any day.
Remember, my hypothetical involved Dachau, which was mostly a slave labor camp, as opposed to an extermination camp. Although about 30,000 died at Dachau (out of roughly 200,000 imprisoned there from 1933 to 1945), captives were not sent there specifically to be murdered, as they were when sent to Auschwitz, Treblinka or Chelmno.
And even at Dachau, where they wouldn’t be facing certain death, the thought of Jews killing their captors — or likely collaborators with their captors — simply to get free would strike few as unjustified.
But what about the second scenario?
This is where it gets interesting.
While some would endorse the same kind of violence in the second case as in the first (and most all Black people would), I think it’s fair to say that large numbers of whites would hesitate, at least for a few moments.
Especially by the time the scenario turned to the killing of the wife or children.
And by the time the question concerned random whites encountered on the run to freedom, I suspect most white people would be mightily uncomfortable with the thought of violence by the escaping Black family.
After all, they would say, those other white people didn’t own anyone. They weren’t the source of those Black people’s oppression.
They were just innocent bystanders.
Sure, like the German civilians on the road leading away from Dachau.
That kind of innocent bystander.
The kind whose innocence would be ethically meaningless to us in the case of Germans during World War Two but which suddenly takes on tremendous moral weight in the antebellum South.
Fascinating.
Many white folks in the second case would start sputtering about how those white women married to white male enslavers were victims too (of patriarchy) and, thus, not culpable for the actions of their husbands. And surely that’s true of the children!
As for random whites encountered along the way?
Why they might even be abolitionists! Quakers for God’s sakes!
They might be “good whites,” for all those runaways know. How can it be moral to kill these people without ascertaining where they stand?
Mmm-hmm.
Nazi Germany was also a patriarchal society, its citizenry governed by fear and intimidation. Many never joined the Nazi Party, and some decent number surely opposed what was being done to Jews, Romani, queer folk and others. A few even helped hide Jews during the Holocaust — the so called “righteous gentiles.”
But no one would think to tell Jews running away from Dachau that they would be obligated to distinguish the good from the bad before shooting them in the head.
It’s why no one flinched when Quentin Tarantino had his characters kill everyone they could in the anti-Nazi film Inglourious Basterds, but there was much discomfort when he had Jamie Foxx do the same to white enslavers and racists in Django Unchained.
It’s why the Warsaw ghetto uprising is seen as fundamentally different than any violent rebellion on the part of Blacks, no matter how marginalized.
As James Baldwin reminded us, Jewish folks are now seen as — and usually are — functionally white:
…and when white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums.
Indeed, and given the persistent unwillingness to honor the violent insurrections and rebellions of enslaved persons — there is no memorial to Nat Turner, and such a thing has been fought by white Virginians for years — the truth should be obvious.
On a scale of moral worth and deservingness, Jews, even amid an uptick in anti-Semitic attitudes, are still generally seen by nearly everyone as white enough to be deemed worthy of freedom and life at whatever cost.
In fact, Jewish whiteness isn’t even as important as our not-Blackness.
Those Jewish folks who get angry at the suggestion that we are mostly just another group of white people in the American racial taxonomy need to grasp this.
Whether Nazis (then or now) view us as white is far less important than whether most average, everyday white people do.
And what really matters is that we are seen as something other than Black, which, in America, has always been the most important thing.
So even Jews who face real bigotry and mistreatment — and, increasingly, violence — will typically still be afforded a value and worth above Black people when we contemplate the legitimacy of one or the other group turning to violence to procure their liberty.
And a people for whom you will not grant an unquestioned right to liberty is a people whose humanity you do not recognize.
I also suspect that white hesitancy to endorse Black liberatory violence — even in historical retrospect, where it cannot hurt anyone — is about something else.
Namely, to admit that enslaved Black people had a right to slaughter their captors — much as you would endorse the right of your child to kill their kidnapper were they taken off the street tomorrow — is to contemplate two things most whites would rather not.
First, for some, those who would have been on the receiving end of that rough justice would have been our ancestors, without whose continued survival we would not exist. Ironically, we realize this, even as we insist enslavement had nothing to do with us and hasn’t impacted us at all.
To admit the righteousness of lethal violence by the enslaved is to acknowledge that if those our forebears held in bondage had done what they were entitled to do, we would not be here; thus, our very existence is owed to Black people who, by their decision not to kill, allowed us to be born.
And second, once we endorse the idea that Black violence in the face of oppression can be justified, we open up a Pandora’s box that might justify Black violence now against systemic racism and injustice.
Even as we deny these are operative, at some level we know better, we know for certain that Black people know better, and we’d really prefer they not imagine themselves as liberators in that Nat Turner kind of way, for obvious reasons.
In other words, we deny the right of Black folks, even long dead, to have done what we would endorse for almost any other people on Earth, even today.
Because deep down, for far too many white people, Black lives don’t matter.
At least not as much.
At the very least, these folks should stop lying to others, and themselves, by pretending that they do.
—
This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
***
You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
Join The Good Men Project as a Premium Member today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
A $50 annual membership gives you an all access pass. You can be a part of every call, group, class and community.
A $25 annual membership gives you access to one class, one Social Interest group and our online communities.
A $12 annual membership gives you access to our Friday calls with the publisher, our online community.