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IN THE SPRING OF 2012, Brown University hosted an extraordinary academic conference. “Being Nobody?” honored the thirtieth anniversary of the publication ofSlavery and Social Death by Orlando Patterson, Harvard’s Cowles professor of sociology. Giving a birthday party for a scholarly book is a rarity in itself. Even more unusual, the symposium’s 11 presenters were not sociologists. They were classicists and historians who gave papers on slavery in ancient Rome, the neo-Assyrian empire, the Ottoman Middle East, the early Han empire, West Africa in the nineteenth century, medieval Europe, and eighteenth-century Brazil, among other topics. “I’m not aware of another academic conference held by historians to celebrate the influence of a seminal work by a social scientist writing for a different discipline,” says John Bodel, professor of classics and history at Brown, one of the organizers.
But Patterson is no ordinary academician. “Orlando is one of a kind—the sheer scope and ambition of his work set him apart from 99 percent of social scientists,” says Loic Wacquant, JF ’94, professor of sociology at Berkeley. “In an era when social scientists specialize in ever-smaller objects, he is a Renaissance scholar who takes the time to tackle huge questions across multiple continents and multiple centuries. There was another scholar like this in the early twentieth century, named Max Weber. Orlando is in that category.”
PATTERSON IS a historical-comparative sociologist who has written extensively on race relations and, especially, slavery and freedom. Slavery and Social Death is “a landmark study that has had very broad and deep impact,” says Goelet professor of medieval history Michael McCormick, who participated in the “Being Nobody?” conference (see “The New Histories,” page 52). Patterson’s Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, a kind of obverse to Slavery and Social Death, won the 1991 National Book Award for nonfiction. Like his mentors, Harvard sociologists David Riesman and Seymour Martin Lipset, “Orlando tries to speak to a broader audience,” says Diker-Tishman professor of sociology Christopher Winship. “In many ways, he ranks among Harvard sociology’s last big thinkers—David Riesman, Daniel Bell, Talcott Parsons.”
The study of culture—of values, established ideas, traditions, language, customs, learned behaviors, symbolic materials, including the arts, and other nonbiological inheritances—has been central to Patterson’s work. Sociologists often contrast culture with structure: the “hard” variables that include prevailing institutions, distribution of wealth, education, housing, jobs, and other “physical-world” factors. For decades, researchers have debated whether culture informs structure, or vice versa.
Many scholars oversimplify culture by equating it simply with values, Patterson says. This can lead to paradoxes like citing the same cultural complex as the cause of opposite results. “Confucianism was used in the past to explain backwardness in China, before it became successful. The Confucian ethic was supposedly inconsistent with capitalism,” he explains. “Then China becomes economically successful, and suddenly it is the Confucian ethic that explains its success. The same cultural values can move in either direction. So you need a dynamic approach that shows how culture interacts with structure.
“Culture is a very tricky concept,” he continues. “It’s like Typhoid Mary—you’ve got to be very careful with it! Most conservatives tend to use the concept in a simplistic way. Liberals are wary of it—there is guilt by association.” That association has roots in the 1966 book La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Povertyby anthropologist Oscar Lewis, which gave an in-depth portrait of a former prostitute living with her sixth husband. Liberal critics attacked Lewis’s “culture of poverty” concept as one that “blamed the victims” for holding values that perpetuated their state: he suggested in La Vida and other work that the poor could pass down poverty-related beliefs for generations, and that such values might persist even after people had achieved better circumstances.
“No one talked about culture for a long time,” Patterson says. “Now it is back, but still wishy-washy as a causal explanation. It’s fine now to use culture like [anthropologist] Clifford Geertz does, as an interpretive, symbolic vehicle [in a classic essay on Balinese cockfighting, Geertz interpreted the cocks as symbols of important men in the village], but not as having a causal role in social structures.”
The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth, edited and to a large degree written by Patterson (with Harvard graduate student Ethan Fosse as co-editor), to be published by Harvard University Press in January, breaks with that convention. “Orlando is first and foremost an iconoclast,” says Winship, and the new book, about impoverished young blacks in American cities, does challenge some received wisdom. It shows not only how much culture matters to these young people, but also their disproportionately large impact on mainstream culture. In October 2003, for example, a turning point in the history of American popular culture occurred when “all of the top 10 positions on Billboard’s pop chart were filled by black artists, nine of them in the inner-city-created rap genre,” Patterson writes in the new book. “It is hardly to be wondered that the typical Euro-American imagines the African-American population to be somewhere between 23 and 30 percent of the U.S. population, over twice its actual size.”
The Cultural Matrix (with chapters by Winship and by Robert Sampson, Ford professor of the social sciences) may also enlighten some readers by demonstrating black youths’ “deep commitment to some of the most fundamental values of the mainstream—its individualism, materialism, admiration for the military, and insistence on taking near complete responsibility for their own failures and successes,” Patterson writes. The young African Americans are surprisingly self-critical, he notes. For example, he writes that “92 percent of black youth aged 18 to 24 say ‘young black men not taking their education seriously enough,’ is a ‘big problem,’ while 88 percent declare likewise on ‘not being responsible fathers.’” Patterson adds, in an interview, “They are more American than Americans.”
Responsible fatherhood is a particularly sticky issue, one that Patterson has often addressed in his studies of African-American history and culture. Slavery in the American South, he says, left no legacy more damaging than the destruction of the black family—the relations between husband and wife, parent and child. Marriage among slaves was illegal, and slaveholders brutally broke slave families apart by selling off children or parents to other masters. “It is true that many slaves were involved in social units that looked like nuclear families, but these were largely reproductive associations based on fragile male-female relationships,” Patterson says. “In many cases the ‘husbands’ lived on other plantations and needed permission to visit their ‘wives,’ and parents had no custodial claims on their children, who at any time could be sold away from them. To call these units ‘families,’ as revisionist historians have done, is a historical and sociological travesty.”
In his 1965 The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (the “Moynihan Report”), Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had taught government at Harvard and was then assistant secretary of labor under President Lyndon Johnson, argued that the relative absence of nuclear families among black Americans, and the relatively large numbers of families headed by single mothers—both traceable to slavery and Jim Crow segregation—were a root cause of African-American poverty. Black leaders attacked the report, accusing it of stereotyping black Americans (particularly men), perpetuating cultural bias, and setting back the civil-rights movement. “Moynihan became the bête noire of sociology. He took a terrible beating from academics,” Patterson says. “It was so unfair. He was an architect of the War on Poverty—the most radical national agenda for black people in American history. The critics all admit that slavery was horrible, but balk at the idea that the destructive impact has consequences today. Yet you cannot neglect slavery’s effects on the black family as a critical component of African-American life.”
Patterson and Moynihan befriended each other as Harvard colleagues, and when the University awarded Moynihan, by then retired from the U.S. Senate, an honorary degree in 2002, Patterson served as his escort at Commencement. Five years later, the American Academy of Political and Social Science and Harvard’s sociology department and Du Bois Institute (now part of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research) co-sponsored a conference of sociologists and economists, “The Moynihan Report Revisited.” “The conclusion they had come around to,” Patterson says, “was that he was right.”
SLAVERY IS a crucial part of Patterson’s cultural heritage. He grew up in Jamaica, a country that endured almost two centuries of ruthless slavery under British rule. He wanted to understand how “the horrendous colonial past of slavery, and then a pretty oppressive post-emancipation era of 124 years, shape the present in terms of poverty and underdevelopment. In the Caribbean, that is a very radical position: it’s part of the neo-Marxian analysis of the plantation system. One of the great ironies of my life is that when I raise the same questions in the American context, because of the complexities of race here, people see it as conservative: ‘You’re blaming the victim! We don’t want to hear about the past—we want to hear about how present-day economic inequalities explain the plight of African Americans.’ But where I come from—both the British New Left and the Caribbean neo-Marxists—history is critical.”
History rolls though every page of Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death. “Slavery has existed all over the world,” he says, even if many Americans imagine it was unique to the antebellum South. “I asked if there were any common attributes to slavery that differentiate it from other forms of oppression, like serfdom,” he says. “What I came up with is that the fundamental feature of being a slave is that slaves are socially dead—both metaphorically and literally. They have no recognized legal existence in the society. They do not belong to the community, because they belong only to the master, and exist only through the master. I use the concept of natal alienation: they have no rights at birth. This doesn’t mean slaves don’t have communities of their own—they did have a slave life, a slave village. But in the eyes of non-slaves they do not belong, they are non-citizens. So after the United States abolished slavery, one of the first things they had to do was to amend the Constitution to make slaves citizens!
“The idea of social death became very powerful, very useful, especially in explaining what happens after slavery is formally ended,” he continues. “For example, Southern Americans, and Americans generally, found it so hard to accept black Americans after slavery was abolished. The culture of slavery still persisted, which is the idea that ‘you do not belong.’ They were nobodies; people were horrified at the idea that they could vote, like citizens. It even lingers to this day. What is the thing people who don’t like Obama say? They try to make out that he doesn’t have a birth certificate—that he doesn’t belong. Even a black president does not belong!”
AN UNEXPECTED OUTGROWTH of Patterson’s study of the socio-historical significance of slavery was his shift to the study of freedom. “I had gone in search of a man-killing wolf called slavery; to my dismay I kept finding the tracks of a lamb called freedom,” he writes in the preface to Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. “A lamb that stared back at me, on our first furtive encounters in the foothills of the Western past, with strange, uninnocent eyes. Was I to believe that slavery was a lamb in wolf’s clothing? Not with my past. And so I changed my quarry.” Patterson’s iconoclasm also informs this work. “The idea of freedom is seen as ‘inherent’—so there is nothing to explain,” he says. “[The idea is that] ‘Everybody wants to be free because it is part of the human condition.’ That’s nonsense. Freedom as a value, as a cherished part of one’s culture, as something to strive for and die for, is unusual in human history. You can’t just take it for granted. So the question turns into, how did freedom become important? My explanation is that freedom emerged as the antithesis to the social death of slavery.”
Under slavery, he explains, there were three groups of people: masters, slaves, and non-slaves. “All three come to discover this thing we call freedom through their relationships. For the master, freedom is being able to do what you please with another person: freedom as power. For the slave—well, what does a slave yearn for? To be emancipated, to get rid of the social death that is slavery. Masters encouragethis notion of freedom, too, as the hope of manumission is one of the most powerful ways to get a slave to work. The third group, the non-slaves or freemen, look at the slaves and say, ‘We are not them. We are born free.’ Suddenly, being born free becomes important, in a way it never could be for slaves. Freemen have a different status in society, one that does not depend on their socioeconomic class.
“If you go deep into Indo-European languages, the linguistic evidence is fascinating,” he continues. “The most ancient root of freedom is a word that meansbeloved or belonging. The people who first celebrated freedom were non-slaves who recognized the virtue of being born free, and belonging to a community of free people—the beloved. These three forms of freedom lie at the roots of democracy, and the first place it emerged was from the slave culture of ancient Greece.”
But Patterson is no ordinary academician. “Orlando is one of a kind—the sheer scope and ambition of his work set him apart from 99 percent of social scientists,” says Loic Wacquant, JF ’94, professor of sociology at Berkeley. “In an era when social scientists specialize in ever-smaller objects, he is a Renaissance scholar who takes the time to tackle huge questions across multiple continents and multiple centuries. There was another scholar like this in the early twentieth century, named Max Weber. Orlando is in that category.”
PATTERSON IS a historical-comparative sociologist who has written extensively on race relations and, especially, slavery and freedom. Slavery and Social Death is “a landmark study that has had very broad and deep impact,” says Goelet professor of medieval history Michael McCormick, who participated in the “Being Nobody?” conference (see “The New Histories,” page 52). Patterson’s Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, a kind of obverse to Slavery and Social Death, won the 1991 National Book Award for nonfiction. Like his mentors, Harvard sociologists David Riesman and Seymour Martin Lipset, “Orlando tries to speak to a broader audience,” says Diker-Tishman professor of sociology Christopher Winship. “In many ways, he ranks among Harvard sociology’s last big thinkers—David Riesman, Daniel Bell, Talcott Parsons.”
The study of culture—of values, established ideas, traditions, language, customs, learned behaviors, symbolic materials, including the arts, and other nonbiological inheritances—has been central to Patterson’s work. Sociologists often contrast culture with structure: the “hard” variables that include prevailing institutions, distribution of wealth, education, housing, jobs, and other “physical-world” factors. For decades, researchers have debated whether culture informs structure, or vice versa.
Many scholars oversimplify culture by equating it simply with values, Patterson says. This can lead to paradoxes like citing the same cultural complex as the cause of opposite results. “Confucianism was used in the past to explain backwardness in China, before it became successful. The Confucian ethic was supposedly inconsistent with capitalism,” he explains. “Then China becomes economically successful, and suddenly it is the Confucian ethic that explains its success. The same cultural values can move in either direction. So you need a dynamic approach that shows how culture interacts with structure.
“Culture is a very tricky concept,” he continues. “It’s like Typhoid Mary—you’ve got to be very careful with it! Most conservatives tend to use the concept in a simplistic way. Liberals are wary of it—there is guilt by association.” That association has roots in the 1966 book La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Povertyby anthropologist Oscar Lewis, which gave an in-depth portrait of a former prostitute living with her sixth husband. Liberal critics attacked Lewis’s “culture of poverty” concept as one that “blamed the victims” for holding values that perpetuated their state: he suggested in La Vida and other work that the poor could pass down poverty-related beliefs for generations, and that such values might persist even after people had achieved better circumstances.
“No one talked about culture for a long time,” Patterson says. “Now it is back, but still wishy-washy as a causal explanation. It’s fine now to use culture like [anthropologist] Clifford Geertz does, as an interpretive, symbolic vehicle [in a classic essay on Balinese cockfighting, Geertz interpreted the cocks as symbols of important men in the village], but not as having a causal role in social structures.”
The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth, edited and to a large degree written by Patterson (with Harvard graduate student Ethan Fosse as co-editor), to be published by Harvard University Press in January, breaks with that convention. “Orlando is first and foremost an iconoclast,” says Winship, and the new book, about impoverished young blacks in American cities, does challenge some received wisdom. It shows not only how much culture matters to these young people, but also their disproportionately large impact on mainstream culture. In October 2003, for example, a turning point in the history of American popular culture occurred when “all of the top 10 positions on Billboard’s pop chart were filled by black artists, nine of them in the inner-city-created rap genre,” Patterson writes in the new book. “It is hardly to be wondered that the typical Euro-American imagines the African-American population to be somewhere between 23 and 30 percent of the U.S. population, over twice its actual size.”
The Cultural Matrix (with chapters by Winship and by Robert Sampson, Ford professor of the social sciences) may also enlighten some readers by demonstrating black youths’ “deep commitment to some of the most fundamental values of the mainstream—its individualism, materialism, admiration for the military, and insistence on taking near complete responsibility for their own failures and successes,” Patterson writes. The young African Americans are surprisingly self-critical, he notes. For example, he writes that “92 percent of black youth aged 18 to 24 say ‘young black men not taking their education seriously enough,’ is a ‘big problem,’ while 88 percent declare likewise on ‘not being responsible fathers.’” Patterson adds, in an interview, “They are more American than Americans.”
Responsible fatherhood is a particularly sticky issue, one that Patterson has often addressed in his studies of African-American history and culture. Slavery in the American South, he says, left no legacy more damaging than the destruction of the black family—the relations between husband and wife, parent and child. Marriage among slaves was illegal, and slaveholders brutally broke slave families apart by selling off children or parents to other masters. “It is true that many slaves were involved in social units that looked like nuclear families, but these were largely reproductive associations based on fragile male-female relationships,” Patterson says. “In many cases the ‘husbands’ lived on other plantations and needed permission to visit their ‘wives,’ and parents had no custodial claims on their children, who at any time could be sold away from them. To call these units ‘families,’ as revisionist historians have done, is a historical and sociological travesty.”
In his 1965 The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (the “Moynihan Report”), Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had taught government at Harvard and was then assistant secretary of labor under President Lyndon Johnson, argued that the relative absence of nuclear families among black Americans, and the relatively large numbers of families headed by single mothers—both traceable to slavery and Jim Crow segregation—were a root cause of African-American poverty. Black leaders attacked the report, accusing it of stereotyping black Americans (particularly men), perpetuating cultural bias, and setting back the civil-rights movement. “Moynihan became the bête noire of sociology. He took a terrible beating from academics,” Patterson says. “It was so unfair. He was an architect of the War on Poverty—the most radical national agenda for black people in American history. The critics all admit that slavery was horrible, but balk at the idea that the destructive impact has consequences today. Yet you cannot neglect slavery’s effects on the black family as a critical component of African-American life.”
Patterson and Moynihan befriended each other as Harvard colleagues, and when the University awarded Moynihan, by then retired from the U.S. Senate, an honorary degree in 2002, Patterson served as his escort at Commencement. Five years later, the American Academy of Political and Social Science and Harvard’s sociology department and Du Bois Institute (now part of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research) co-sponsored a conference of sociologists and economists, “The Moynihan Report Revisited.” “The conclusion they had come around to,” Patterson says, “was that he was right.”
SLAVERY IS a crucial part of Patterson’s cultural heritage. He grew up in Jamaica, a country that endured almost two centuries of ruthless slavery under British rule. He wanted to understand how “the horrendous colonial past of slavery, and then a pretty oppressive post-emancipation era of 124 years, shape the present in terms of poverty and underdevelopment. In the Caribbean, that is a very radical position: it’s part of the neo-Marxian analysis of the plantation system. One of the great ironies of my life is that when I raise the same questions in the American context, because of the complexities of race here, people see it as conservative: ‘You’re blaming the victim! We don’t want to hear about the past—we want to hear about how present-day economic inequalities explain the plight of African Americans.’ But where I come from—both the British New Left and the Caribbean neo-Marxists—history is critical.”
History rolls though every page of Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death. “Slavery has existed all over the world,” he says, even if many Americans imagine it was unique to the antebellum South. “I asked if there were any common attributes to slavery that differentiate it from other forms of oppression, like serfdom,” he says. “What I came up with is that the fundamental feature of being a slave is that slaves are socially dead—both metaphorically and literally. They have no recognized legal existence in the society. They do not belong to the community, because they belong only to the master, and exist only through the master. I use the concept of natal alienation: they have no rights at birth. This doesn’t mean slaves don’t have communities of their own—they did have a slave life, a slave village. But in the eyes of non-slaves they do not belong, they are non-citizens. So after the United States abolished slavery, one of the first things they had to do was to amend the Constitution to make slaves citizens!
“The idea of social death became very powerful, very useful, especially in explaining what happens after slavery is formally ended,” he continues. “For example, Southern Americans, and Americans generally, found it so hard to accept black Americans after slavery was abolished. The culture of slavery still persisted, which is the idea that ‘you do not belong.’ They were nobodies; people were horrified at the idea that they could vote, like citizens. It even lingers to this day. What is the thing people who don’t like Obama say? They try to make out that he doesn’t have a birth certificate—that he doesn’t belong. Even a black president does not belong!”
AN UNEXPECTED OUTGROWTH of Patterson’s study of the socio-historical significance of slavery was his shift to the study of freedom. “I had gone in search of a man-killing wolf called slavery; to my dismay I kept finding the tracks of a lamb called freedom,” he writes in the preface to Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. “A lamb that stared back at me, on our first furtive encounters in the foothills of the Western past, with strange, uninnocent eyes. Was I to believe that slavery was a lamb in wolf’s clothing? Not with my past. And so I changed my quarry.” Patterson’s iconoclasm also informs this work. “The idea of freedom is seen as ‘inherent’—so there is nothing to explain,” he says. “[The idea is that] ‘Everybody wants to be free because it is part of the human condition.’ That’s nonsense. Freedom as a value, as a cherished part of one’s culture, as something to strive for and die for, is unusual in human history. You can’t just take it for granted. So the question turns into, how did freedom become important? My explanation is that freedom emerged as the antithesis to the social death of slavery.”
Under slavery, he explains, there were three groups of people: masters, slaves, and non-slaves. “All three come to discover this thing we call freedom through their relationships. For the master, freedom is being able to do what you please with another person: freedom as power. For the slave—well, what does a slave yearn for? To be emancipated, to get rid of the social death that is slavery. Masters encouragethis notion of freedom, too, as the hope of manumission is one of the most powerful ways to get a slave to work. The third group, the non-slaves or freemen, look at the slaves and say, ‘We are not them. We are born free.’ Suddenly, being born free becomes important, in a way it never could be for slaves. Freemen have a different status in society, one that does not depend on their socioeconomic class.
“If you go deep into Indo-European languages, the linguistic evidence is fascinating,” he continues. “The most ancient root of freedom is a word that meansbeloved or belonging. The people who first celebrated freedom were non-slaves who recognized the virtue of being born free, and belonging to a community of free people—the beloved. These three forms of freedom lie at the roots of democracy, and the first place it emerged was from the slave culture of ancient Greece.”
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