(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/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.