What Slaveholders Think

How Contemporary Perpetrators Rationalize What They Do

Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231543828
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Slavery
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on fifteen years of work in the antislavery movement, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick examines the systematic oppression of men, women, and children in rural India and asks: How do contemporary slaveholders rationalize the subjugation of other human beings, and how do they respond when their power is threatened? More than a billion dollars have been spent on antislavery efforts, yet the practice persists. Why? Unpacking what slaveholders think about emancipation is critical for scholars and policy makers who want to understand the broader context, especially as seen by the powerful. Insight into those moments when the powerful either double down or back off provides a sobering counterbalance to scholarship on popular struggle.

Through frank and unprecedented conversations with slaveholders, Choi-Fitzpatrick reveals the condescending and paternalistic thought processes that blind them. While they understand they are exploiting workers' vulnerabilities, slaveholders also feel they are doing workers a favor, often taking pride in this relationship. And when the victims share this perspective, their emancipation is harder to secure, driving some in the antislavery movement to ask why slaves fear freedom. The answer, Choi-Fitzpatrick convincingly argues, lies in the power relationship. Whether slaveholders recoil at their past behavior or plot a return to power, Choi-Fitzpatrick zeroes in on the relational dynamics of their self-assessment, unpacking what happens next. Incorporating the experiences of such pivotal actors into antislavery research is an immensely important step toward crafting effective antislavery policies and intervention. It also contributes to scholarship on social change, social movements, and the realization of human rights.

1

IN ALL ITS FORMS

Slavery and Abolition, Movements and Targets

The worker is my cash machine, my fate.

—Aanan (Interviewee 39)

I liked Aanan as soon as I met him.¹ My field notes read What a nice guy, you can just see from his face. His favorite god is the god of truth. Open-faced and conversational, he was enthusiastic about the explosive growth in his quarry operations and excited to show me around. Together we toured the open mines where his workers carve, day by day, into the earth. The process produces boulders, which are broken down into gravel by smaller laborers, often women and children. Together with his laborers, Aanan laughed at my efforts to repeat the process for myself, the sledge high over my head before arcing down, momentarily disappearing into shards and dust.

He showed me the crushing equipment that transformed gravel into silica powder, proudly explaining that the Indian multinational Tata was the exclusive buyer of his materials. I had met Aanan through a friend of his, a reference that considerably eased his concerns about speaking with an outsider regarding his operations. I asked him how he managed challenges with laborers, something I knew contractors and farmers were having trouble with in every area I had visited as part of my research.

You have to understand the mentality of laborers, and you should know how to make them work. You have to know why the laborer won’t work, is it because of money?…To manage a group of laborers is like managing a group of primary-school children. They have to be provided with food or clothes, and they are taught how to behave and act in that environment. We have to apply the same tactic with laborers…. Sometimes they start drinking alcohol; sometimes they indulge in feasts. So we have to pay them with caution. We divide them into small groups because larger numbers of workers tend to form a union and sometimes engage in mass holidays or strikes.

For Aanan, the happiness of the worker is paramount. Understanding the obstacles to indebtedness and helping the worker stay in food and clothes, and out of drink, are each intended to serve as a protective cocoon around the laborer—and around Aanan’s profitability. That this had the effect of insulating his operations against insurrection was not lost on him: “Since he is the source of income for me, it is my duty to look after him. The worker is my cash machine, my fate.” In this one statement, Aanan has captured a central contradiction inherent in most human rights violations worldwide: rights violations often occur at the intersection of culture and capital, in the overlap between relationship and extraction, at the moment where care and exploitation intersect.

Though landlords complain about alcohol and other indulgences, these are also tactics for increasing debt-based dependencies. Taking advantage of this situation allows the landlord to maintain the upper hand both economically and ethically. The moral distance that alcohol puts between Aanan, as a Brahmin, and his untouchable laborers facilitates economic exploitation. It also shrouds the larger tactical terrain in a mist of paternalistic concern. When the workers “become defiant” and leave, Aanan says, he has little recourse. There is no paperwork to reflect the nature of the arrangement to the police. For this reason it is important to predict and mitigate risk. He explains:

We know that they will form a union. Like a shepherd who knows his herd like the back of his hand, we know the laborers. It’s like understanding psychology. Anyone can become a contractor, but a good contractor knows the nuances of his job. He can gauge the mood of the workers and then make them work…. Thus, little by little, with caution, we claim back our money. It is the emotional pressure that works.

For Aanan, the employment of laborers in the quarry sector requires balancing the needs of the laborers with those of the owner. This equilibrium requires emotional pressure at the moment of economic vulnerability. It requires human-resourcing practices that increase worker satisfaction while minimizing the risk of mobilization.

While not every one of the slaveholders I spoke with in the course of this research was as frank as Aanan, his approach bears the hallmark traits of contemporary slaveholding: financial distress, emotional manipulation, illegality, and paternalism. At the end of our conversation, I inquired about Aanan with one of my research partners. Yes, they had heard of him. I updated my field notes: Largest contractor in [town]. Current employer of numerous bonded laborers. Brahmin.

When most people think of contemporary slavery, the popular imagination leaps to a desperate brothel, one pulled straight from the pages of a newspaper article or activist brochure. The scene is sordid; the victim, pure; and the perpetrator of this human rights violation, an animal of the worst sort. Reality is nowhere near this simple. Contemporary slaveholders, like contemporary slavery, come in many forms. Of course, these men have other terms for their socioeconomic roles and relationships, including “employer,” “boss,” “landlord,” “farmer,” “contractor,” “master,” and “landowner.” The evil villain surely exists, but more frequently, contemporary slaveholders are respected members of their community, violating human rights but not social norms.²

This is exactly how I would describe most of the rights violators I met in the course of this study. Ahmed, a middle-class slaveholder in Uttar Pradesh, India, was eager to show me around the village where he was a member of the ruling elite. While I was grateful for the warm reception, I was visiting Ahmed’s community because of the prevalence of gross human rights violations—bonded labor, child exploitation, and outbound human trafficking. Fathers pleaded for help in finding missing children, long gone, lured away by the promises of traffickers. Mothers who had recently and reluctantly formed a fragile women’s group waited nervously to meet and discuss their progress in negotiating higher wages. Behind the weeping men and the expectant mothers sat the children lucky enough to remain in the community, hand-rolling local cigarettes.

These scenes are common throughout rural India and are repeated across the global South, where the intertwined pressures of poverty and hope have been more likely to terminate in rights violations than a better life. Individuals exploited in slavery deserve safer lives, smarter laws, and greater opportunities. There is a near-global consensus about victims’ needs. But who are the perpetrators? Do Aanan and Ahmed not see the scene—debt bondage, child labor, trafficking—as I do? Conversations with contemporary slaveholders suggest that they do not.

The author Kevin Bales has argued that social movement activity over the past decade represents the most recent of several abolitionist movements to end human trafficking and slavery (Bales and Cornell 2008). Enthusiasm, activism, and funding have spilled over into those countries most affected, India included. The issue has found its way into the foreign policy portfolios of Western governments and into the budgets of major donors. Popular attention has focused on victims of contemporary slaveholding. Critical attention has been focused on the role of poverty in generating a supply of exploitable people. Activists’ efforts have focused attention on the demand side of the equation—high expectations for low prices on sex and labor. Scholars have pointed out the important role played by globalization and macroeconomic forces. But somehow, amid all this attention, slaveholders themselves have come off as rather crudely drawn villains.

While this perception is rooted in the ongoing reality of violent exploitation, it does not help us better understand human rights violators as human beings going about their own lives. This is especially true in South Asia. Almost half of the world’s enslaved people are thought to live in this region, where rigid social hierarchies are only lately facing serious challenges. Behavior now considered to be slaveholding had simply been part of the broader tapestry of social and economic relations and had enjoyed general support or, at least, gone unnoticed.

The small but growing body of scholarship on contemporary slavery has yet to analyze human rights violators in any depth. This is not surprising considering how recently the issue has come to public and scholarly attention. Yet this gap should give us pause when we consider the key differences in proposed approaches to eradicating slavery and trafficking, an effort to which the U.S. government has committed hundreds of millions of dollars. Indeed, the women’s self-sufficiency group I met in Uttar Pradesh must deal with the slaveholder in one way or another if it is to gain the social and economic power it seeks. Likewise, movement organizations must approach wealthy and powerful perpetrators like Ahmed and Aanan with tactics matched to their real and perceived status. This lesson may be seen no more starkly than in the American South during Reconstruction, where plantation owners opted for a blend of sharecropping and social marginalization that produced durable inequality (Blackmon 2009, Tilly 1998). It is imperative to understand variation in exploiters and exploitation as well as the exploiters’ own perspectives on how their lives are changing. Perhaps we will then better understand the difficulties involved in securing sustainable emancipation.

THE ARGUMENT

I am a sociologist working within an intellectual tradition focused on social movements. My academic colleagues and I ask how and why people mobilize together to demand change or to defend the status quo. Our go-to cases include the civil rights movement; three waves of struggle for women’s rights; movements to change hearts, minds, and laws regarding marriage equality; and social inclusion for gays and lesbians. Our big debates revolve around the ways structure, agency, and culture shape collective action. Abolitionist movements provide an excellent opportunity to explore these issues, though it seems that the job of explaining earlier waves remains the job of historians.³

Scholars in this field should take note: collective action against slavery is the world’s oldest vein of social movement activity. The London-based nonprofit group Anti-Slavery International (ASI) has been in operation since its foundation in 1823 as the Anti-Slavery Society, making it one of the world’s first, oldest, and longest-running human rights organizations on record. ASI has served as an important and enduring institution across each stage of the world’s four antislavery movements.⁴ Its American counterpart, Free the Slaves, has adopted a social movement strategy for global abolition (Bales 2007). Antislavery work, historically and in its contemporary form, is fundamentally global. Efforts to remedy public and private wrongs have both broken new ground in broadening definitions of who counts as human while also exposing old fault lines of sexism and bigotry.⁵

While I hope this volume is of interest to many, I have taken this opportunity to point out several opportunities for expanding social-movement scholarship. These more theoretical observations are concentrated in chapter 2. Those wishing to get directly on to the story can skip forward to chapter 3. The book’s primary theoretical contribution is as follows: First, at its core, this book is about how slaveholders, as human rights violators and as social movement targets, describe exploitation and emancipation. Defined in greater detail in chapter 2, “movement targets” are those individuals (or institutions and ideas) that social movements target for change. I am convinced that much can be learned from their frustration with broader changes and a sense of betrayal following local emancipation efforts. This book’s second contribution is to use these perspectives to develop a tentative theory of how slaveholders respond to social movement challenges. I argue that although movement targets may respond with direct repression or oblique countermobilization, they may instead respond by persisting in the old activity (if they are able), continuing with a version of the targeted behavior, or quitting their oppressive activities altogether. The book’s third contribution is to use slaveholders’ perspectives to advance tentative hypotheses about why slaveholders may respond in this way. I argue that a combination of willingness and ability to respond to social movement attention shapes targets’ response. This is complicated, as not all who would like to respond are able to do so. Some wishing to persist or repress may fail in an attempt to do so, particularly if the nature of their power has changed. That nature may change, for example, as a result of larger shifts in their worlds, especially those that challenge their dignity and livelihoods. Social-movement scholars may note that I adapt Doug McAdam’s ([1982] 1999) political-process theory to demonstrate that macro change processes, interpretive processes, the attribution of threat and opportunity, resources, tactics, and strategic interactions affect both social movement challengers and their targets. This adaptation requires learning and reappraisal on the part of targets. The result is a more interactive explanation for how structural realities impose themselves on movement actors.

A caveat is in order. In framing antislavery efforts as social movements for human rights, I invoke two complementary but distinct approaches for explaining this case: social movements and human rights. As a scholar with some experience in both fields, I am motivated to see more work that clearly links scholarship on ends (human rights) and means (collective action). While not all social movements pursue human rights ends, and not all human rights ends are pursued via social movement tactics, many scholars are hard at work in the areas where they overlap. While I have anchored my more micro analysis in social movement theory, it is increasingly possible to conduct large-scale studies on these same puzzles.⁶

THE DATA AND THE STUDY

Around half of the world’s slaves are held in debt bondage in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, where contemporary interventions against slavery usually take two forms (Bales 2012). The first general form involves radical breaks with the past, especially raids and rebellions. The second form involves more gradual transitions, such as community organizing, rights education, and voter mobilization. Radical breaks are often punctuated by conflict and disruptive challenges; more gradualist strategies prioritize a balance between social harmony and social change. In either case, interventions are critical turning points with obvious effects on the attitudes and behaviors of former slaveholders.

To assess these effects I have conducted 150 interviews with four groups of respondents in rural India: employers (current and former slaveholders), laborers (currently and formerly enslaved individuals), community leaders (village heads and others), and key informants from social movement organizations. These interviews were semistructured and lasted an average of eighty minutes per person, with eight to ten respondents per site. I conducted focus groups with an additional 150 people who had been rescued from severely exploitative conditions and whose slaveholders had absconded, were in jail, or were otherwise unavailable. The number of participants in each focus group ranged from a dozen to more than thirty. Each focus-group discussion lasted around two hours.⁷

In total, I spoke with individuals from sixteen intervention sites. By triangulating responses from a range of community members I am able to sketch a portrait of the life and times of small slaveholders in northern and southern India. Interviewees were identified in collaboration with research partners operating in three Indian cities: Allahabad and Varanasi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh and Bangalore in the southern state of Karnataka. While research partners brokered initial contacts, I identified subsequent interviewees after conducting successful interviews with this original round of former slaveholders. This leapfrog approach to interviewing elites helped secure interviews with a broader range of interviewees than an approach brokered solely by my research partners.⁸ This process also helped assuage the fears of reluctant interviewees.

Several of the more powerful or abusive employers refused to sign the study’s consent form until we were done speaking. Paradoxically, those were the longest and most fruitful conversations, frequently lasting longer than two hours and in one case lasting more than three. While candor may seem unlikely, it is sometimes the product of a successful intervention. Collective-action interventions generate new social and political actors and spaces. Women’s groups, through which communities maintain social contact, are one such example. Early in this study I asked a women’s group, “Where is the person who was exploiting you through bonded labor?” The answer surprised me; the vocal leader of the women’s group pointed to an unassuming man, sitting at the group’s edge, who acknowledged the fact with a wave and an apologetic smile. In the final analysis, only two prospective interviewees, one a former laborer and the other the leader of the local government (panchayet), declined an interview request. It is important to note that all current and former slaveholders interviewed ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• 1. In all its Forms: Slavery and Abolition, Movements and Targets
• 2. Best-Laid Plans: A Partial Theory of Social Movement Targets
• 3. Just Like Family: Slaveholders on Slavery
• 4. As if we are Equal: Slaveholders on Emancipation
• 5. The Farmer in the Middle: Target Response to Threats
• 6. Private Wrongs: Slavery and Antislavery in Contemporary India
• 7. Long Goodbye: The Contemporary Antislavery Movement
• 8. Between Good and Evil: The Everyday Ethics of Resources and Reappraisal
• Notes
• References
• Index