NELL IRVIN PAINTER: Morrison asks instead, “Who are these people?”—focusing not on the victimized enslaved, but on the victimizing owners. “The definition of the inhuman describes overwhelmingly the punisher…the pleasure of the one with the lash.” Rendering the slave “a foreign species,” Morrison concludes, “appears to be a desperate attempt to confirm one’s own self as normal.” Humanity links the enslaved and the enslaver, no matter how viciously owners seek to deny the connection. Torture, the crucial ingredient of slave ownership, dehumanizes not the slave but the owner. “It’s as though they are shouting, ‘I am not a beast! I’m not a beast!’ ” Neither side escapes unscathed.
Even when physical force is used, the people doing the Othering can also bolster their self-definition through words. Thomas Thistlewood, an English planter and rapist who moved to Jamaica in 1750, documented his assaults on the women he owned, categorizing those that took place on the ground, in the fields, and in large and small rooms, whenever, wherever he wished. He noted the rapes in his journal in Latin. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin takes a very different tone, defining the Other by making a romance of slave life. Stowe presents a slave’s cabin through dulcet description that Morrison calls “outrageously inviting,” “cultivated,” “seductive,” and “excessive.” Here, a white child can enter black space without fear of the dark, the very sweetness of the language reinforcing the Otherness of places where black people live. More here.