Scenes of Subjection

Hartman examines Congressional discussions surrounding the postbellum amendments to the Constitution and civil rights legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, and the Fourteenth Amendment. In this examination she pays attention to the powerful discourse of “equality” and teases out tensions within this discourse.

For example, while the Fourteenth Amendment and Civil Rights Act of 1875 provided equal legal protections, both Congress and the Supreme Court did not see an intrinsic tension between equal protection and discrimination. Debate instead focused on the kind of discrimination occurring rather than the fact of discrimination.

The rhetoric of impossible responsibility that helped to create burdened individuality for freed people, as discussed in Chapter 5, was articulated in Congressional discussions concerned with both Black equality (via civil rights) and racialized difference. Many advocated Black responsibility within a narrative of Black “self-making,” which newly conferred rights supposedly enabled. Now fully legal subjects, it was argued, emancipated people had nothing to complain about and had full agency to create their own lives. Hartman draws attention to another tension here—that between this approach to legal equality and the “redress” that enslaved people had sought in their everyday practice.