I thought of this recently when I read Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, the second line of which is “I wanted to write a lie” (Laymon, 1). Rankin’s aim is to create sympathy for slaves, but the only way he knows how to do that is by replacing black bodies with white ones. Black suffering is so difficult a concept for white people that it can only be made plausible by saying “now imagine that the people beaten are white men, white women, and white children.” This kind of empathy, writes Hartman, is “related to both the devaluation and the valuation of black life” (Hartman, 21). The problem with Rankin’s imagined scene, argues Hartman, is that “the effort to counteract the commonplace callousness to black suffering requires that the white body be positioned in the place of the black body in order to make this suffering visible and intelligible” (Hartman, 19). “My flighty imagination added much to the tumult of passion by persuading me, for the moment, that I myself was a slave, and with my wife and children placed under the reign of terror” (Hartman, 18). In an effort to convince his slaveholding brother of the horrors of slavery, Rankin describes imagining himself as a slave. Hartman writes about empathy as modeled by the white abolitionist John Rankin. In Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Saidiya V.
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