books include Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy.
McWhorter applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self, with the following results:
Page 99 of Unbecoming Persons is near the end of Chapter 3, “Imposing Personhood: African Enslavement and Indigenous Resistance.” It describes US government efforts to force the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole peoples to abandon their traditional relationship with the land either by accepting individual (male) landownership or by leaving their native territories and relocating to “Indian Country,” what is now Arkansas and Oklahoma.Learn more about Unbecoming Persons at the University of Chicago Press website.
In 1819, President Monroe’s Secretary of War John C. Calhoun negotiated a dubious treaty with a small group of Cherokee men in Washington that rewarded those who “had demonstrated an adoption of ‘American life-styles’” (plantation agriculture and slaveholding) with 640 acres each and a path to US citizenship. Meanwhile, the government continued to press for removal of all who refused to abandon tribal relations with land. In 1830, President Jackson signed the controversial Indian Removal Act (which had passed Congress by only five votes) and began a formal process of dispossession and relocation. The Cherokee sought legal recourse for several more years, as did the Creek until 1832. Although thousands eventually made the trek west, some hid in the mountainous backcountry or fled south to join the more militant Seminole resistance.
No single page could possibly capture the central idea of Unbecoming Persons for the simple reason that the book is more a process of discovery and of dismantling assumptions than it is the development of a single thesis. However, page 99 does present a very significant step in that process. Earlier chapters demonstrate that the modern concept of “person”—with its strong Roman legal ancestry and the moral, political, and epistemological meaning it acquired in the work of John Locke—is inextricably bound up with proprietorship. The modern person is the owner of its thoughts, actions, and labor and as such can also own material and intellectual property. This concept of personhood was a tool of British colonization. As Locke insisted, Indigenous people, like European people, are to be judged as individual persons; persons who do not manage and cultivate their resources properly are to be punished with dispossession—precisely because, as individual persons, they are morally responsible for their failure. When Indigenous people refused to treat land as property, they refused Lockean personhood as well.
The first chapters of Unbecoming Persons present a genealogy of the concept of personhood with special attention to Roman law and Christian Trinitarian theology and the ways those lineages come together in social contract theory. It shows how personhood emerged at the turn of the 18th century as a mechanism for enforcing regimes of private property and forcing European peasants into wage labor or workhouses and how it was used to justify colonization and slavery. The final chapters of the book explore a variety of possibilities for resistance to personhood’s most dangerous aspects and for creating and leading good lives beyond the strictures of post-Lockean propriety.
--Marshal Zeringue