Edward Ball '82 chronicled his exploration into his family's history as slaveholders and the implications of that history for their descendents in a lecture Tuesday evening. The lecture was part of programming presented by the University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.
Ball is the author of a National Book Award-winning memoir, "Slaves in the Family," in which he examines his family's history. He spoke in Salomon 001.
Though many groups have been singled out over the course of American history for their unique traits and lore, slaveholders as a group are often left out, according to Ball, because of a general reluctance to address the stigma of slavery and slaveholding.
"There are people in this room who want to put America on the examining table and diagnose the sickness that is slavery," Ball said in the opening of his lecture. "But the patients don't believe that they're sick."
From 1698 to 1865, Ball's family observed 4,000 African Americans either born into slavery or purchased for one of its 12 plantations. He estimates that today, about 8 percent of Americans are the progeny of slaveholders and that these people are characterized by a sense of loss of the social status that being a slaveholder once guaranteed them.
"When a ruling class is deposed, its children seethe for generations," Ball reminded his audience, contending that many remember plantations as a "necklace of country clubs strung across the South that fell to ruin and vanished," which allows their memory to be "cloaked in fantasy."
While there may be no unbroken chain of wealth from slavery to present, Ball suggested that a different sort of wealth has been passed down from slaveholders through the generations: cultural capital.
"The people that have it don't know that they do, because it is enmeshed in us as southern whites - a poison gift bequeathed by slaveholders to their offspring," Ball said. "It's a feeling of pride, insecurity, resentment, mythology, the deserving rich stripped of everything."
Reversing this mentality isn't easy, Ball said, and it is a question of restorative justice that legislation cannot help, unlike justice of revenge. "It's a person-to-person transformation that happens over the course of generations. And you don't expect to end it with a press conference," he said.
"The physical apartheid in the South might be over, but the apartheid of the mind will be much harder to remove because it is planted in the unconscious," Ball said. "The prognosis is bad, because the reality is that Americans are not introspective people."
