Breaking into the Big House: Anti-Blackness and the Misappropriation of the “House Slave”
Breaking into the Big House: Anti-Blackness and the Misappropriation of the “House Slave”
“if we can accumulate from your suffering why would we change the equation?”
— Joy James
“Ever you go in the world you’ll find bits of the plantation”
—Bedour Alagraa
“Acting black—a whole social world of irony, violence, negotiation and learning is contained in that phrase . . . an unstable or indeed contradictory power, linked to social and political conflicts, issues from the weak, the uncanny, the outside. Above all, the slipperiness [...]”
—Eric Lott, Love and Theft
On a 2017 episode of his late-night show, ‘Real Time with Bill Maher,’ one of America’s premier envelope-pushers and political commentators opened his mouth and infamously spoke out of turn. As one might recall, Maher’s guest that night, Nebraska senator Ben Sasse had invited the late-night host to take part in a political pilgrimage of sorts. Encouraging the New Yorker to visit Nebraska, Senator Sasse extended an offer of invitation: “We’d love to have you work in the fields with us,” he announced. To Sasse’s offer, Maher replied with incredulity. “Work in the fields?” he retorted. “Senator, I’m a house nigger.” During the controversial episode in question, what many, at first, described as a “slip-of-the-tongue” was exposed as more than a mere accidental occurrence. In an attempt to lampoon his own pretension, Maher saw fit to invoke none other than the house slave— a figure who encapsulates all the domestic horrors, fictions, and contradictions of slavery— as his own narrative inheritance. Following the episode’s airing, Maher has since stated that he was merely overtaken by an expressive impulse. In her 2017 New Yorker article on the incident, critic Doreen St. Félix considers this alibi of compulsion, the “linguistic thrill” that might be enjoyed by a white man saying a bad word. After all, Maher may have been on to something when he called upon the house slave as a naughty joke. What could be more pleasurable, more thrilling, than a joke everyone understands? What could be funnier than a house nigger?
Met with public outcry for his use of the “n-word” and poor attempt at historical comparison, Maher’s utterance inspired many calls for the political commentator to be fired from HBO. And though he would subsequently apologize live for his word choice (read: slave selection), Maher’s retraction ultimately failed to clean up the actual mess that had been made. His true crime had gone unpunished. Never to answer for the narrative robbery he had committed, Maher got away with what minstrelsy historian Eric Lott might refer to as a kind of ‘identity theft.’ For this reason, Maher is not “in the clear” simply because his controversial remark has left mainstream attention. One can never break into the “big house,” without tripping a few alarms. For many, the public outcry against Maher had been fixed on the matter of his right to the word ‘nigger,’ obscuring critical engagement with the specific enslaved status at the core of his joke. It turns out that the question of whether or not Maher should be “allowed” to say what he said is not the most interesting or generative one we might ask. Rather, it is the communicative and cultural success of his reference which ought to earn our attention. The invocation of the house slave is made novel not by its citation but by its efficacy. After all, slaves are valued for their utility. And house slaves, in particular, are called upon to furnish and accommodate a host of domestic concerns.
The figure of the “bougie” house slave, which Maher saw fit to reference on air, is potent because it is productive. The logic goes, that it is, in fact, the slave who knows leisure. She is luxury’s antecedent, the person-made-passage for its possibility and preservation. She is bound to bear domestic burdens and tasked with spiriting away all unseemly evidence of life. The house slave must live in intimate proximity to all her toil has wrought and bear witness to its consumption. And thus, by virtue of her domestic duties, she is, allegedly, a covetous captive. She is traitorous to her race and resentful of the labors of the liberation struggle, not because of its imposition, but due to an idiosyncratic complacency. For Maher, the “house nigger” proved to be a narrative helpmate for this very reason. Buttressing a sloppy remark about his disinterest in rural grassroots political work, Maher imagined himself an uppity slave. In doing so, he sought to name the house slave as the embodiment of an old irony. To be both domesticated and unsheltered is a tragicomedy of sorts. Who is more qualified for the narrative task of exemplifying materialism than those who were forced to organize the inanimate into a material life for others?
Trapped by racial imaginations that fight to keep her both in- and out-doors, the “house slave” from inception has been auctioned off to maintain the interiority of white lives. Incarcerated by the desires of others, she is thought to be audacious enough to transform her knowledge of wealth into want. And for this, she has earned another life after slavery as a cheap joke about political laziness and cowardice. In this second life, she is, as we can see, still for sale. In 2017, Maher merely joined a long line of bidders seeking narrative ownership over her. Unremarkable, he is but another white man who raised his tongue in pursuit of her services.