Language

The primary sources for this project are newspaper advertisements seeking the capture and return of enslaved people who were attempting to free themselves. The words of the enslavers who wrote these advertisements objectified the enslaved, and the notices were imbued with the racist beliefs of people who saw the escapees not only as inferior to themselves but as property.

The stories on the Freedom Seekers webpages are intended to reject and transcend the racist language and ideology of the enslavers who wrote advertisements for freedom seekers. Our hope is that these stories will acknowledge and explore the individuality, the bravery, and the essential humanity of those who resisted slavery through escape. We must therefore be mindful of our language. Many of the words found in the advertisements we use should not appear in the essays that we craft. We encourage all who write these stories to think carefully about their language and what is implied by terms that may carry layers of meaning and that perhaps can be interpreted as continuing to objectify and demean those who were enslaved.

We will not be prescriptive and will judge each essay submitted on its own merits, assessing the author’s intentions and language as best we can, although on occasion we may ask authors to consider minor changes. Below are some of the terms that we encourage authors to think about.

• Slave and slaves: These are words that until recently were used regularly in writing about this history. More recently, however, many authors have tried to avoid using these words because they render human beings as objects. Using enslaved is often preferable, because it emphasizes what has been done to a person, and how a condition has been imposed upon them.

• Slave-owners and slave-holders: These terms have also started to fall out of favor because they grant status to certain people as a result of their ownership of human property. Enslavers is often preferable, because it emphasizes that those who claimed ownership of other people were actively and constantly working to exercise power and control of those people they claimed as property. It underlines that enslavement depended upon the ongoing exercise of power and the constant threat of violence.

• Masters: As long ago as 1865, formerly enslaved people declined to refer to those who had once bound them as “our former masters,” preferring instead “our former oppressors.”[1] The term “masters” makes sense in certain contexts; White boys, girls, and young adults worked as apprentices, domestic servants, and so forth, and the heads of households who directed their labor were often called “masters.” But the power relationship between enslaver and enslaved was radically different, so the term “master” is not sufficiently powerful to acknowledge ownership and violent rule.

• Black and White: It is becoming increasingly common to capitalize the word Black when referring to people of African descent. Capitalization of Black enlarges the meaning of this descriptive term, from a simple reference to skin color to an acknowledgement of the racial and ethnic identity of a people whose culture was taking shape in the face of violent repression. Some scholars and writers also capitalize White if it is referring to White Euro-American society and culture in a similar fashion.[2]

• Names: Many advertisements give the full name of an enslaver (such as John Preston), while giving only a single name, often demeaning, that had been imposed upon an enslaved person (such as London). If the author of an essay chooses to refer to the enslaver by both first and last name, or, as is often the practice in historical writing, to refer to the enslaver by surname, the essay may inadvertently echo the problematic power relations that lie at the heart of the advertisement. Calling the one “Preston” and the other “London” accords citizenship and legal identity to John Preston, who had the distinction of a last name, and it subordinates London, who was deprived of this distinction, to less than full personhood. One way of addressing this would be to refer to the two by their given names: John and London. Of course, in the event that an enslaved person was given a surname in the advertisement, it would make sense to refer to both by their last names. Also, if an advertisement indicates that the enslaved person in question had taken a name of their own (rather than the one imposed by the enslaver), using the chosen name would be in order.

Further reading:

LaTanya S. Autry, “The Afterlife of Slavery: Language and Ethics,” (July 2018), Wakelet.

P. Gabrielle Foreman, et al. “Writing about Slavery/Teaching About Slavery: This Might Help,” community sourced document.

Bridgette L. Hylton, “Why We Must Stop Referring to Enslaved People as ‘Slaves’,” Human Parts, June 12, 2020.

Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads,” Social Text, XXXVI (2018), 57-79.

Nell Irvin Painter, “Why ‘White’ should be capitalized, too,” Washington Post, July 22, 2020.

Katy Waldman, “Slave or Enslaved Person? It’s not just an academic debate for historians of American slavery,” Slate, May 19, 2015.