ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Stanley M. Elkins’s interpretation of the slavery experience and points to some evidence indicating that the period of American slavery was indeed, as Robert Blauner suggests a culture-building era, and a crucial one. The infantilism which Elkins describes as typical for surviving inmates of concentration camps was produced by a life situation which had virtually none of the characteristics of a functioning Black culture. According to Elkins' theory, the psychological forces making for infantilization would have been most powerful in the situations of greatest oppression, where slaves were most closely governed by naked terror, where conditions most closely approached those of the concentration camp. Elkins sets the stage for his argument on slave personality by comparing the North American variety of the system with its relatively more "open" counterpart in Latin. Elkins, of course, recognizes the picture as a white racist stereotype, but argues, quite correctly, that one cannot therefore assume it’s necessary untruth.
