Slave on the Block

“Slave on the Block” highlights the tension between the political ideals of white liberals and the reality of their day-to-day interactions with Black people. During the 1920s, white people were eager to explore Harlem and to consume the music, dance, and art that Black people created in giving birth to the Harlem Renaissance. However, those interactions didn’t always translate to greater social and political equality for Black Americans.

Still, wealthy white people like the Carraways were avid consumers of Black music, art, and culture. For them, Black culture afforded an experience of life they considered free from the inhibitions of a stale Western culture that had lost moral authority with the coming of World War I and the insights of people like Sigmund Freud. Freud and others highlighted the degree to which people were not the rational creatures that the 16th- and 17th-century thinkers of the Enlightenment had painted them to be. Instead, people were irrational and motivated by drives like sex.

The Carraway couple, like many liberal-minded people of this period, see Black people as more in touch with their primitive natures. Creating art influenced by African and Black American culture, slumming through Black quarters like Harlem, and engaging socially with Black people are their efforts to approximate the freedom that they associate with being more primitive.