Dread Scott on His Recreation of an 1811 Slave Rebellion

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: You have said you can’t actually understand American society if you don’t understand slavery. And you can’t understand slavery if you don’t understand slave revolts, and that obviously goes to the heart of the reenactment of 1811 slave revolt that you’ve performed.

DREAD SCOTT, ARTIST: Yes. Well, I think that’s really true. I mean, a lot of times we talk about, well, you know, this is a democracy. It had founding fathers. They wrote the constitution that gave freedom, et cetera. But America is a society that was founded on slavery and genocide. That’s the essence of what America is and where it comes from. The constitution actually enshrines slavery as part of its founding understanding, that freedom of some people was predicated upon the ownership of other people. And that’s actually what America is. But then, you have to actually understand slave revolt because people were rebelling ever since they were captured and brought to these shores and brought to the shores of the Caribbean. And that’s essential. If you don’t get that, you don’t actually understand the history or the present.

AMANPOUR: And so, you decided to reenact this 1811 revolt that is — I think it was called the German uprising.

SCOTT: The German Coast Uprising.

AMANPOUR: And it was pretty much unknown. I mean, it sorts of got forgotten. But interestingly also, people, I suppose, thought that there were no revolts. The slaves were pretty happy just being who they were.

SCOTT: Well, that’s a mythology that’s been somewhat consciously sort of reinforced and perpetuated and not just by people that are conscious racist. The training that enslaved people were happy is so deep that people don’t even question it by and large, except for a lot of black people. We question that. But it’s — you know, it actually rationalizes and justifies the continued sort of treatment of people of African descent in this country. You don’t actually get a situation where a policeman on a welfare call in Fort Worth, Texas could show up in two seconds after he somebody murders them. You don’t get that without slavery. And so, this notion of happy enslaved people actually kind of racializes and justifies that, oh, you know, the white race is free it do with black people whatever they want. And so, that is something that’s both very dangerous, has real-life consequences today but it also has tremendous import for how black people see ourselves. And I’ve talked with a lot of college-aged students and there’s almost a shame or stigma of being black which is back to people not actually understanding that they were not the descendant of slave but they’re the descendants of people that were enslaved. And that they’re in their current position because of all the resistance that’s happened. If you rob the history, it actually has tremendous effect on people that live today. And so, you know, this German Coast Uprising, the knowledge of that was suppressed from day one. There are complex reasonings for why that was done. But, you know, this was the largest rebellion of enslaved people in the history of the United States, that should be something that everybody knows. It’s basic