https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/09/01/dc-building-school-renaming/
According to a Washington Post article published on September 1:
“A White House statement called [Muriel] Bowser (D) ‘the radically liberal mayor of Washington, D.C.’ and said she ‘ought to be ashamed for even suggesting’ revisions to the marble monuments dedicated to presidents who were enslavers.”
Actually, if you read the White House statement itself – which the WaPo article ought to link to, but doesn’t – you will see that there is no mention made anywhere to “presidents who were enslavers.” The only specific names mentioned are Christopher Columbus, Andrew Jackson, and Jefferson. The White House statement asserts that “Our Nation’s capital is rightly filled with countless markers, memorials, and statues to honor and respect the men and women who built this country.”
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-press-secretary-090120/
The WaPo article also informs us that D.C. mayoral advisor Beverly “Perry cited founding father Franklin’s history as an enslaver…”
What exactly is meant by the word “enslaver”? On the face of it, I would imagine that it means someone who enslaves one or more people. And I would suppose that to “enslave” people means to take people who are free, i.e., not slaves, and make them slaves – to capture free individuals, shackle them, or imprison them – deprive them of their freedom of movement and independent action. But that would mean, if my definition were valid, that for a cotton plantation owner in the South in the 1850s to have purchased slaves from a slave merchant, that plantation owner would not have been an “enslaver” who had “enslaved” the people he purchased. Why not? Because they had already been enslaved by the people in Africa who had initially captured free Africans and then sold them to slave merchants or directly to the officers of slave ships responsible for buying slaves for transport to “the new world.”
The prefix “en” as in “enslave,” “enlarge,” or “endanger,” is “used with native and imported elements to form verbs from nouns and adjectives, with a sense ‘put in or on’ (encircle), also ‘cause to be, make into’ (endear), and used as an intensive (enclose).”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to “enslave” is “To reduce to slavery; to make a slave of.” Merriam-Webster tells us that to “enslave” is “to reduce to or as if to slavery : SUBJUGATE.” From these definitions it would follow that, if a person has already been enslaved, he cannot be termed to be “enslaved” by the act of selling him from one slave-owner to another.
I know I’m no longer supposed to use the words “slave” or “slave-owner,” because, presumably, it demeans or diminishes people to call them “slaves” rather than to call them “enslaved persons,” and, presumably, it legitimates the human rights abuse of slavery by assuming that one person possibly could own another person and therefore be a “slave-owner.” But I don’t buy it. In the history of the world, for thousands of years, on most if not all continents except Antarctica, people of all colors – white, black, red, yellow, brown – have captured other people, of the same or different color, and made them slaves. I do not believe that it makes this despicable, deplorable practice acceptable by using the term “slave” rather than “enslaved” or to say that someone was “owned” rather than “enslaved.” Nor do I believe that it humanizes people to call them “enslaved” rather than “slaves.” And I assert that the term “enslaver” is an inaccurate and possibly misleading substitute for “slave-owner.”
Must we also call people in prison “imprisoned” and not “prisoners”? Or how about “victimized” but not “victims”? This sort of term-substitution strikes me as a misguided, though well-intentioned, effort to right historical wrongs. Yet it has become a word game that only makes our language more awkward and less precise without making our thinking more moral.
Politically correct language can have advantages, but it can have disadvantages as well. To call 18th and 19th century American presidents “enslavers” is to confuse the public. From Washington to Grant, most American presidents owned one or more slaves at some point during their lives. Why throw the ambiguous term “enslavers” into the mix? If you can’t bring yourself to say that someone “owned” slaves but you don’t want to mislead by calling that person an “enslaver,” what about the simple verb “had,” as in, “George Washington had slaves”? Or, to use another simple, monosyllabic verb, "George Washington held slaves" or "George Washington held people as slaves."... Just some suggestions.
