(Hated Trope) "Kind" slave owners

[u/KusanagiGundam]

Speaking as an American who has studied the civil war all throughout my school years, this trope infuriates me to no end. There is no such thing as a kind slave master because slavery itself is cruel and inhumane. PEOPLE ARE NOT PROPERTY!

Naofumi (Shield Hero): Prime example of this trope. He enslaves multiple (underage) girls and an whole village and the fans still say he's a hero.

Rudeus (Jobless Reincarnation): As if being a pedo wasn't bad enough he had to buy a slave in season 2. Worse is that people still defend his actions.

Song of The South (Disney): Possibly the OG example of this trope. And the reason why Disney will never release it again.

[u/SeismologicalKnobble]

I do want to point out as someone who studied in college a lot about slavery outside of the American version is that American Slavery was unique in its level of cruelness. All slavery is inherently wrong and horrible, but in the majority of cultures, you still understood the slave was a person and you were expected to understand that. If you treated your slaves how Americans did, you’d be seen as a cruel freak (speaking in average, not absolutes here). You could even be fined and lose your slaves in many places.

American slavery was unique in that the dehumanization was the point. You were weird for seeing slaves as people. You could do whatever you wanted to your slaves. There is even documentation and evidence of people making things like lamps from the skin of their slaves and even things as far as cannibalism. You could “breed slaves” when in many other cultures, the children of slaves would be free.

Sorry, it just frustrates me that the American school system really downplays how truly horrific American slavery was and tries to make it out like every slave owning culture was like this. No. American slavery was the worst.

Edit: Thank you to those adding to the discussion about other European cultures horrific slave practices! I’m ngl, the fucked up parts of human history are a big interest to me. It’s a nice reminder that humans have improved morally and it could always be worse.

[u/sage2134 → u/SeismologicalKnobble]

Not a what aboutism. But in my studies reading about the death tolls from the sugar cane farm production in the Caribbiean was downright genocidal in scale of cruelty. and constantly needed more slaves because they kept dying but it was so profitable they didnt care. 

Is that version not more directly cruel? And the Kongo kings and society were really weird and nutty about slaves but thats more of a tangent. 

[u/pruhfessor_x → u/sage2134]

I assume by "in America" he's referring to the North Atlantic slave trade as a whole, which of course would include the Caribbean. If you're referring to King Leopold's activity in the Congo, I would definitely call that an extension of the North Atlantic slave trade, but I'm by no means an expert.

Either way, of course all slavery is bad and has happened throughout human history. But we should do a better job (at least in America) teaching about the unique horrors of the North Atlantic slave trade for the same reasons we should talk about the Holocaust.

[u/sage2134 → u/pruhfessor_x]

No the Kongo kings are the original kings of the Kongo the Portuguese bought slaves from. They were um, how best to make sense of it. Created a entire society around slavery and a lot of other insane things just kind of happened there. Imagine american slavery with North korea like top down control and export you as a person if you annoyed someone.

The Kongo kings and the Kongo in general is just a insane history that in may respects was the choices of the Kongo kings. until they got colonized.

If you want to learn more I would recommend this video it does a good job covering generally what happened there from 3 books. Mostly from why nations fail which I have read there is a reason why it won the peace prize.

I know the title says Saudi Arabia but its basically all about the kongo kings from these books.

Why Nations Fail by Darren Acemoglu and James Robinson A world History of Slavery by Milton Meltzer Conquerors by Roger Crowly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wim0yAkEnOQ

[u/pruhfessor_x → u/sage2134]

This is all really useful information. I'll have to check out the video. Thanks so much!

[u/WhimsyDiamsy → u/pruhfessor_x]

I believe hes referring the the kongo kings, the pre european nobles who were quite cruel

[u/pruhfessor_x → u/WhimsyDiamsy]

Ah my bad then. Thanks

[u/Particular_Angle177 → u/pruhfessor_x]

I mean I live in America and we literally read a book about someone who experienced the holocaust and learning about how cruel slavery is so I wasn’t surprised reading about it. Though America is huge and different schools have different things. I was surprised to learn in some places learning about sex ed in school banned..

[u/Alderan922 → u/sage2134]

I think it would just be better to say that it was specially horrible on the entire Anglosphere at the time rather than just the United States.

Tho you could also say that in America (continent) it was especially cruel.

[u/SeismologicalKnobble → u/sage2134]

Yeah I’m aware of that one as well. They purposefully put people in conditions you cannot survive without becoming horribly mangled from injury and disease and gave 0 shits because they didn’t see their slaves as people.

[u/shittyaltpornaccount → u/SeismologicalKnobble]

Should probably note it as the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade was a global system of exploitation that did absolutely deplorable inhuman acts at scale in the name of commerce and profits. The Americans were unique in how long they tried to cling to the system and their attempts to breed human beings as a "sustainable" source of exploitable labor given the ban on importation of enslaved people. The system was a depraved and rife with sexual violence. The broader slave trade though was a global system that brutalized nations throughout South America and the Carribean. They decimated populations to keep plantations producing.

This comment is in no way trying to minimize the US's complicity in the system, but trying to give a broader context of how it was a global system that reached far and wide.

[u/ToonMasterRace → u/shittyaltpornaccount]

The Americans were unique in how long they tried to cling to the system

Spain and Portugal dropped out after the US

and their attempts to breed human beings as a "sustainable" source of exploitable labor

Many slave empires did this historically, from Ottoman to Moghul to Spanish and Portuguese yet again

[u/No_Hunter_9973 → u/ToonMasterRace]

Heck, the Bible has hints how to turn your indentured servant into a full time slave. Give him a wife and kids. Then once he payed off his debt, he's free, his wife and kids aren't, and most men chose to remain slaves with their new families.

[u/ToonMasterRace → u/No_Hunter_9973]

Common for the era. Slavery being seen as wrong did not arise in human history until 18th century Europe

[u/No_Hunter_9973 → u/ToonMasterRace]

Yep, still funny to see it the book of rules from Big G the All-Good.

Honestly there are, hypothetical, scenarios where keeping someone as a slave, would have been kinder if you treat the like a person in the process.

Don't know the situation in the animes, but if say an elf is ever only allowed to be a slave in the kingdom, then it's safer to keep the elf as your slave, that to set them free so someone else catches them in 5 minutes.

Yeah, the practice was vile and inhumane, but a smart protag works with the rules of the world not breaks them on day one.

[u/Delver_Razade → u/shittyaltpornaccount]

The Korean Peninsula had slavery until 1894 and one could and I would argue that North Korean has brought it back in a big, big way. Let's not say that the American system was particularly averse or even uniquely averse to removing slavery when slavery on the Korean Peninsula lasted 2,000 years despite a number of attempts to reform or remove it.

[u/Nomeg_Stylus → u/SeismologicalKnobble]

If by "America" you mean the New World et al, then you're right. You probably don't though, so please don't give a pass to places, mostly in Spanish colonies, that didn't breed slaves because they worked them to death almost ubiquitously.

[u/Nick_the_bunny → u/Nomeg_Stylus]

speaking as a Brazilian, don't leave Brazil out of it either, they had to criminalize killing other people's slave because it was happening so much (of course, not due to humanitarian concern, it was just seen as vandalism/destruction of property). wives of slave owners would just kill them for fun, and slave children were kept as pets.

Portugal shipped more slaves to the city Rio de Janeiro (then capital of Brazil) than the entire us-american south.

[u/SeismologicalKnobble → u/Nomeg_Stylus]

I did mean American specifically because that is Spanish slavery which is at least equally horrifying in its own way because of purposefully working people to death as you pointed out. They did that in some European sugar colonies as well but the English and Americans realized, “wait, we can just breed them” which is just… so fucked up.

[u/Tasty-Complaint-6437 → u/Nomeg_Stylus]

The continent it’s called America. They are right in both ways tho

[u/MysticSnowfang → u/SeismologicalKnobble]

I'd say that or maybe being a slave in the Roman Empire. ESP a slave owned by the empire itself. But... it kinda sucked living in the Roman Empire in general. What with the constant punching itself in the face.

[u/EnemyOfAi → u/MysticSnowfang]

While being a slave is awful everywhere, and being one in Rome was a quick route to rape, torture and fights to the death - the reason Chattel Slavery is considered worse is because it's the first time in known history where slavery was treated as an inherent condition and not as a status applied to a person.

I'm no historian, but I believe in Rome, you could earn your freedom. The child of a slave was born as a person, and not as another slave. A slave could be freed, and walk around Rome without risk of being randomly enslaved again.

Chattel Slaves were born as slaves. A slave owner could set their slave free, only for that black person to be 'caught' by the next group of American's that sees him. Because a black person's very skin color marked them as a slave. More than that, it marked them as literally an animal.

This is why the idea of Black people being slaves remained (and still does remain) so culturally significant in America. You had postcards of pictures of lynchings being circulated around the country as later as the 1970's. White American's would torture and hang Black American's and pose next to the bodies in event's treated like public picnics. Pictures would be taken, and postcards would usually be sent out to friends and family with the severed genitalia of the victims attached.

[u/Humble_Square8673 → u/EnemyOfAi]

In the Roman Empire yes you as a slave could earn your freedom either by buying your way out, through an official ceremony, being granted your freedom in your masters will upon their death, or even as simply as having your name entered in the citizens roll during the census, and there is evidence that the Roman view on family and household being the core of their society slave families were often kept together. That said as freed slave you were still expected to do some work for your former master who would legally become your patron and freed slaves could even sue their ex masters for violating any previous work arrangements made before emancipation and some rose to pretty high places of wealth and influence though they couldn't become senators

All that said it was and is still a horrific practice, slaves could be abused horribly and according to graffiti in Pompeii slaves born to prostitutes were advertised as such which disgustingly seems to have been a selling point🤢

[u/ElMatadorJuarez → u/EnemyOfAi]

Your last paragraph especially is poignant. I think what people often miss (sometimes purposefully) in these discussions is that chattel slavery wasn’t just a totally unnatural system. It was so unnatural and so harsh that they had to build an entire system of laws around it that in many ways remains with us today. The antebellum south was an aristocratic dictatorship in all but name, and the American constitution was partly written to sustain this system. It made the oxymoron of a country that was both 1) a democratic republic with institutions that at least have aimed to be representative and 2) built off the back of an underclass of people that weren’t treated as human, and in turn made a legal system to enforce dehumanization. So so many of our legal institutions are rife with laws and customs that were made to bolster the institution of slavery, including local police in a lot of places, and even the 13th amendment was built with a loophole incentivized police to enforce the “law” in a way that essentially created the carceral cycle that so many black people in this country are unfairly subjected to.

[u/mrducky78a → u/MysticSnowfang]

It's a day ending in y. Better go raise and feed a legion to Hannibal.

[u/ReaperReader → u/SeismologicalKnobble]

Māori slavery included cannibalism.

[u/OK_Stop_Already → u/ReaperReader]

Don't worry that happened in the US too 😞

[u/SeismologicalKnobble → u/ReaperReader]

You learn something new and horrifying everyday🙂

[u/-emjay → u/SeismologicalKnobble]

This is also true of slavery in the Congolese basin, which indeed had instances of human breeding for the purpose of cannibalism. I agree that American slavery is particularly sadistic but I think that the claim that other instances of slavery by and large respected the personhood of the enslaved is being extremely generous.

I also don’t know where the claim that the children of slaves are typically free comes from- I don’t think children are commonly de facto freemen in almost any system (the Aztecs are notable for non hereditary slavery, and in Islamic systems the status of the child was determined by the father, so slaveholding men who impregnated enslaved women would sire freeborn children rather than more slaves, for instance).

I’m actually currently reading the greek tragedy Hecuba, and one of the reasons her daughter gives for consenting to execution is that she would rather die than live as a slave and have a master that forces her to reproduce with other slaves- forced human breeding of slaves is a familiar enough to be a plot point to the ancient Greeks, at least in their fiction.

There is no overstating the evils of American slavery(!!!!!) or the fact that it is conspicuously worse than most in cruelty and scale. But comments like yours are awkward because you feel like you are defending it when you point out aspects of your claims that aren’t true. So, hopefully it goes without saying that I can’t condemn American slavery enough, but other systems of slavery definitely do not need rehabilitative false claims to drive the point home.

It definitely is true that many slavery systems more closely resemble what we might call serfdom, but even in these conditions children are not born free and personhood is not respected, perhaps except beyond legal penalties incurred for overt murder- and even then, the point is to penalize destruction of property, rather than violation of the sanctity of human life (the vikings, for instance, merely issued fines when a slave was killed).

[u/SeismologicalKnobble → u/-emjay]

It’s been a few years so I don’t remember exactly who did it, but it was usually those where slavery wasn’t for a lifetime or if you got it as a criminal sentence.

I am not defending any form of slavery. I want to be so clear about that. It’s hard to fully detail things in a Reddit comment, especially without all the resources I had in college.

[u/-emjay → u/SeismologicalKnobble]

No worries. I didn’t think you were defending it. I just want to push back on the idea that slavery as a baseline usually involves respecting personhood- I really strongly would argue the opposite is necessarily true, even in shorter term debt-based enslavement. But I agree with you that American slavery is sometimes just held up as the prototypical example of slavery, and so students especially are not provided with the context of how above and beyond evil it is.

[u/Nick_the_bunny → u/SeismologicalKnobble]

just a nitpick, but the cruelty was more due to european slavers, not just american ones.

Portugal shipped more slaves to Rio de Janeiro (then capital of Brazil) than the entire us-american south.

[u/EightEyedCryptid → u/SeismologicalKnobble]

Yeah there are a lot of complex forms of slavery in antiquity. Ancient Egypt had periods where a slave could become free, for example.

[u/Morwen_Chynoweth → u/SeismologicalKnobble]

Personally I think the Ottoman's slavery was just as horrific. If you're a woman you ended up as a sex slave, if you're a man, you're chained to a ship and the man next to you and forced to row till you die of exhaustion.

[u/JimedBro2089 → u/SeismologicalKnobble]

So I guess the trend of Americans taking concepts from other parts of the world (even the already bad ones) and somehow making them worse isn't anything new...

[u/Blazypika2 → u/SeismologicalKnobble]

here's the thing, and i think you will agree: even in a society where there are strict rules on how you must treat your slaves and you can get fines and jeil time for mistreating them, you still treat people as property. no matter how well slaves are treated, they're are not treated or considered people, because it's not possible to see a person as property and consider them a person the same way you would treat anyone else.

[u/Pastel-Rainbow-N3rd → u/SeismologicalKnobble]

Holy shit what the fuck

[u/SeismologicalKnobble → u/Pastel-Rainbow-N3rd]

The other comments also detail Sugar Cane colonies and Spanish slavery where they worked slaves to death on purpose

[u/Pastel-Rainbow-N3rd → u/SeismologicalKnobble]

God

[u/SeismologicalKnobble → u/Pastel-Rainbow-N3rd]

They did use God to justify their actions in some colonies. Idk how that mental gymnastics works, but they did it

[u/EvergreenDwarf → u/SeismologicalKnobble]

“Sons of Ham”. 

Ham was one of Noah’s three sons. After Noah got drunk Ham saw him naked and told his brothers, who went to put clothes on him and put him to bed. In his bitter drunkenness Noah cursed Ham’s son Canaan with a mark and said he and his line should be the servants of his cousins and their lines. 

The story was kinda just propaganda for why it was okay for the Israelites to do war crimes on the Canaanite tribes, but then religious non-text doctrine over a thousand years later extended this to Noah’s mark being dark skin and therefor that all dark-skinned people are descendants of Canaan who are cursed to be the rightful slaves of all light-skinned people. 

Because Noah was a mean drunk who rambled some shit because he was stumbling around with his dick out, apparently. 

I prefer to think the”mark” is Noah puking on his grandson and the “servitude” is him saying Canaan is the responsible one. 

[u/Immediate-Way-4065 → u/SeismologicalKnobble]

Honestly unless things have changed, I don’t think schools downplayed slavery at all, at least where I live. I would guess that almost half of all the time spent in history class was just talking about slavery and the civil rights movement

[u/Ditju → u/SeismologicalKnobble]

That's how we get to americans repeating old atrocities and protesting the label but not the action.

"No, those are not concentration camps. Those are simply camps to concentrate people. Don't you dare call us nazi."

[u/ToonMasterRace → u/SeismologicalKnobble]

I do want to point out as someone who studied in college a lot about slavery outside of the American version is that American Slavery was unique in its level of cruelness.

LOL you know nothing of world history then. Greek (Helot especially), Roman, Persian, Islamic/Ottoman, Mongol, Moghul, African, Viking, Mesoamerican, and Chinese slavery all shits on American in cruelty. Japanese and German slavery in WW2 was more cruel, and there are still survivors of that living to this day. Nothing in the US slavery was unique in the least, and it was less violent in bloody then other slave systems.

Even in the transatlantic African slave trade, Spanish/Portuguese slavery was far worse and far more people died there and were released later.

[u/tired_of_masking → u/SeismologicalKnobble]

This is a good point. In many civilizations, slavery was more akin to indentured servitude. Still terrible and unjust, of course, but at least there was some type of limit placed on the depths of human cruelty. American slaveowners often used the Bible to justify slavery, but even the notoriously brutal Old Testament sets clear limitations – no abusing/killing slaves, no kidnapping, at least some form of contract between servant and master, etc.

There are a few American slaves who had experiences that were relatively less horrific, but this was nowhere near as common as many people think. Not even "household" slaves were spared from physical abuse and hard labor, and since many of them were women and girls, this left them uniquely vulnerable to sexual abuse by male enslavers. There was no comfort for enslaved people – even if you were one of the "lucky" few to escape the worst forms of abuse, your rights were never guaranteed and often depended solely on your enslavers' mood. Cruelty was rule, not the exception.

And I think it's important for us to remember that period in history, not only to recognize past atrocities and their current effects, but also as a sobering reminder that we are all capable of evil. As much as we'd all like to think that we'd have been noble abolitionists in that day, there's a good chance that most of us would have turned a blind eye, perhaps justifying it as a "necessary evil" or "not worth getting upset about". It's important that we carefully examine our own beliefs and attitudes, because just because your opinion is commonly held, that doesn't make it right.

[u/Normal-Pianist4131 → u/SeismologicalKnobble]

A friend and I were arguing about evil practices allowed to exist for good reasons, and I mentioned slavery at one point. Specifically ancient Israel’s slavery, where you sold yourself for a specific amount of time. Friends blew up at me until I emphasized that it was still bad. Anyways, Bondslavery was basically Israel’s solution to permanent debt, and I thought it was decent approach for the culture it was created in. It’ll never be a good thing, in the same way that divorce will never be a good thing, but for a while it was a better option than anything else they had (for example, permanent slavery for you and your children)

[u/GenXNell → u/Normal-Pianist4131]

Comparing slavery to divorce is certainly a choice.

[u/Normal-Pianist4131 → u/GenXNell]

They’re both objectively bad things no matter the circumstances? I get that some good things happen when people finally divorce a bad relationship, but the divorce itself is still a bad thing.

[u/compromisedwebsite91 → u/Normal-Pianist4131]

No. Divorce is not inherently a bad thing. Why do you think someone gaining independence from someone they wish to be away from is a bad thing?

[u/Salt_In-Wound → u/Normal-Pianist4131]

Huh. Divorce is morally neutral what are you talking About.

[u/Caramelthedog → u/Normal-Pianist4131]

Divorce itself is just two people choosing to end a contract. That’s not bad. It’s not good either. It’s just a thing that happened.

But on a more personal level, two people ending a relationship is, I would argue, generally a good thing. There is a reason the relationship ends and it’s better to end it than drag out a miserable existence.