The+Black+Work+Ethic

failure to follow directions will negatively impact your grade LM - //The Black Work Ethic// explores the labor tendencies of black slaves in the pre-Civil War. Presenting much testimony, Genovese creates an overly optimistic image of black dedication to their work. She claims that black labor of this time period was defined by black cultural influence to community work, incentivized work, and individual work. Slaves were driven to perform their jobs depending on how readily their productivity related to themselves. If the fruits of their labor were for their masters, they slowed down their pace to what many whites percieved as a naturally lazy. Whereas, when given the incentives of self-benefit, slaves tended to show overwhelming bursts of energy. Although historically true, her many examples substantiating the patterns of slave productivity's correlation to black benefit were narrow in scope and only investigated one trend in the black work ethic. Her scope of analysis is clearly limited when consideration is given to the following.

An ocean away from their ethnic and cultural home, black slaves underwent a process of severe cultural dehumanization. It is true - slave communities' roots in Africa remained undeniably visible when they came here to America. But the persistence of their community working trends from tribal Africa into the Plantation South could not have been as complete as Genovese assesses. Slave work habits on plantations were defined essentially by how well their masters were pleased with the level of productivity; when the master's quotas were not met, punishment based motivation (rather than the incentive based motivation Genovese claims was most predominant) was used widely. It is important not to forget that slaves in the south were given no legal, moral, or cultural consideration amongst most of the ruling whites. It was simply easier for planters to force their slaves to work that it was for those same planters to develope a rewarding system. Genovese brings up how slaves were widely considered to "own their time" on Sundays, even legally in Louisiana. But this observation cannot be made out of the premise that masters were generous with their slaves, or such that morale and loyalty to work might improve. If that was the case, planter's gernosity towards their slaves would have been more widespread and visible. With this example, it was more necessary for slaves to have a physical recouperation day, and for their oversee-ers to have a day off as well. There was no way to work slaves seven days a week without deteriorating their productivity, for work like this would have killled moral and physical strength. Slaves were a large investment for hte planters, and unhealthy slaves were not productive slaves. Knowing these white slave holders had rejected all of the rights of another person, knowing that they //all// hypocritically maintained belief in American individual liberty, and knowing that they forsaked moral obligation for econmic incentive provides clear evidence that slave holers were not benevolent. Thus, it was not generosity on the part of the slave owners that casued slaves to recieve time off and other benefits; it was necessity.

Another issue Genovese brought up was the pleasure taken by slaves when working in groups. She claims this permitted trend provided much joy and vitality within the slave community. A better interpretation of their good feelings towards community labor would consider their opportunity to work in groups a relief to the turmoil of slavery, as opposed a cultural persistence. The overwhelming majority of slaves were worked in the sole light of being productive; slaveholders were not generous people that encouraged cultural persistence in their slaves. Slaveholders, by the very fact that they supported slavery, were dehumanizingly moral-less, ethnically erogant, and most of al overarchingly cruel. Any assessment of slaveholders as considerate of the pleasure and rights of slaves in incorrect.

(I appologize if this post seems like a tirade against Genovese's interpretation, but I fundamentally think she grossly understated and de-emphasized the oppresiveness of the institution of slavery. I find her essay closely leaning towards justification of the state of slaves, which is an invective against all reasonable reflection.)

week one
RIL: Incentives given to slaves by their owners to work harder were shown to be beneficial to both the slave and the slave holder. Some slave owners rewarded slaves who would work on what was legally the slave’s own free time. By giving the slaves incentives to work during their time off, which was during Sundays and holidays, more work was done. It stands to reason that it was because of these incentives that slaves chose to work during those days and that, without those incentives, they would not have worked during their time off. By giving slaves a chance to earn some extra money, or some other prize, plantation owners improved production because more work was done. This was a good thing for the slaves since they were compensated for their extra work and were given an opportunity to earn something for themselves, and it was a good thing for their owners as well since more work was done. Other motivational techniques also helped the owner and helped the slaves. Some plantation owners gave their slaves some reward for working hard or better than the others. By rewarding those who worked hard or well, owners gave slaves a reason to work hard and well. Without such a motive, there would be less reason for slaves to work effectively since nothing good would come to them from such work. Competition, which included a reward, also worked to improve production. Rewarding the best of the slaves gave slaves motivation to work productively, and more than that, to work more productively than the other slaves. The plantation owner would benefit from everyone’s hard work since they would all be pushed to work harder because they had something to gain for themselves. The slaves would have no reason to compete with one another if there was nothing in it for them and by giving them a reason to compete it was possible to increase every slave’s production since many of them would have a chance of being rewarded. Sometimes such competitions were group based which would also increase any teamwork the slaves might have. This would improve their working as a unit along with individual work. By encouraging slaves to work harder, faster, and better slaves profited from the rewards and owners profited from the increased production. well written but lacking depth checked