The Paradox of Confession: Nat Turner, Racism, and Truth

Abstract

In theory, confession is a narrative of truth-telling. Yet, as a genre of legal discourse, confession paradoxically does no such thing. In law, confession as truth-telling unwrites itself, inscribing in the confessant’s consciousness, even her flesh, the truth of the interrogator. This article examines the discursive construction of confession in different historical settings as a perlocutionary act which performs the guilt of the accused and their associates. Only by doing so may the audience, be they Athenian citizens, clerical Inquisitors, Continental judicial torturers, or American police and jurors, reach narrative closure.  The purpose of this article is to unmask the dynamic of confession as a stratagem used by those in power to superimpose and justify their ideological assumptions on those who are marginalized and victimized by extant social orders.  In particular the article reviews the complex philosophical relationship of anamnesis and anagnorisis in the production of legal truths. The article uses The Confession of Nat Turner, the most famous of American confessions, as a focal point to illustrate how confession functions as a tool to sustain institutional racism in America grounded in the legacy of slavery. The article provides a two-fold analysis of confessional practices in Western legal traditions. First, it succinctly reviews the history of confession from antiquity through the modern civil and common law traditions: in the Athenian courts where the testimony of slaves was admissible only under torture; in late medieval ecclesial courts where conversos, placed on the rack, confessed heresy to Inquisitors; in Continental civil law courts where torture was employed to elicit confessions to fulfill the standard of certainty to sustain convictions; and even in police stations today, not just in America, but in  police headquarters around the world, where the Reid technique is widely used to coerce confessions from the innocent. Second, the article focuses on the realities of American slavery which produced countless slave rebellions, from individual acts of resistance to organized slave rebellions.  The most successful of these rebellions was the Nat Turner insurrection of 1831, which resulted in the killing of some 55 whites, including white men, women, and children.  The article reviews the alleged original confession to Thomas Gray, the literary incarnation of Nat Turner’s confession by William Styron, and its cinematic portrayal in Nate Porter’s Birth of a Nation.  The article then examines the underlying object of confession, the truth or aletheia, and the extent to which this truth can be re-membered (anamnesis) or, if irretrievably lost, can be re-imagined (anagnorisis).  Anagnorisis, however, is not the truth of the police station and the courts, but rather a kairotic, redemptive truth which provides hope to those oppressed by the contemporary legal system .The article concludes that confession, not only in the courts of Athens, the Inquisitors’ cells, and the torture chambers of the early modern Continental law but also in the police station and the courts of the United States, produces a legal truth that serves the ideological script of existing authorities.  The reliance on confession serves to perpetuate the legacy of slavery and racism rather than the cause of justice.