Most people today, including Blacks, don't really understand how horribly evil slavery was. The poor enslaved people were afforded no more dignity than a horse or a hunting dog, although like dog owners, some slave owners were kind, and some were cruel. Some slaves were even allowed to work for pay for others, when they weren’t busy with a task the master had set. But like a dog or horse then, the slave was there to make a profit from.
There are some today who posit that there were white slaves from Ireland. There weren’t. When the potato famine hit, many signed contracts to work for only room and board for a set number of years. These people were not slaves; they were not property, nor were they considered animals. If you murdered an indentured servant, you would likely go to prison or the gallows.
A real slave had no more rights than a horse or a dog, which was absolutely no rights at all. Remember that only in the last century was there any organized opposition to cruelty to animals. Slaves were considered subhuman animals. The only penalty for murdering a slave (which wasn’t considered murder, since slaves weren’t considered human) was the price he paid for the slave. If he killed someone else’s slave, a civil court would make him reimburse the slave owner, and a criminal court might possibly fine him for misdemeanor vandalism.
Most Americans were horrified when the Trump administration tore immigrant children from their parents’ arms and put them in cages, but what happened to slave children was far worse.
If you were a child of slaves, you were your parents’ owner’s slave. And your parents, one or even both, could be sold to someone hundreds of miles away. You had no rights. You, yourself, could be sold. But not even this was the worst.
Human beings were bred like dogs for hundreds of years. They were bred for size and strength, like other farm animals, and were bred to be easy to teach. They were bred to be cheap to feed and otherwise maintain, to tolerate extremes of heat and cold. They were bred to be sold.
It was American eugenics. The slaveholders unknowingly, over hundreds of years, bred a superior breed of human. Humans who are mostly larger (although like dogs, some were bred to be small), stronger, needed less food, could stand more heat and cold.
The white supremacists have it backwards, and have since not long after they started collecting slaves from Africa.
You might think “wow, I wish I was Black.” That would be incredibly ignorant. Slaves weren’t bred for longevity, since once the slave was sold, he no longer mattered to you. You made your filthy profit. Physically, Blacks are more prone to heart disease and other diseases than other races, although it’s far more than family traits; institutional racism probably has far more to do with it than genetics.
Racism needs to stop. It’s stupidity incarnate. Especially stupid are the white people who think they’re superior to people who were unknowingly bred to be superior by the inferior people who stupidly bred them to be better people than themselves.
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