In this text, the author talks about slavery and what it used to be like. He explains how it used to be and how it was cruel and unusual. For example, slaves used to speak the language of their enslaver, they worked harder than normal people and they died earlier. Their opportunity to participate independently in exchange economies was so small, they rarely accumulated property. He mentioned that they were called by nicknames as an animal name or any other bad word. They were also treated like beasts or animals; people were using “work like a slave” with a harsh meaning. Few of them could escape slavery and some of them commited suicide. Planters used to hate slaves, from their perspectives slaves were labor and nothing more they worked hard at play, for they needed to distinguish themselves from those who simply worked hard. The enslavers were so hypocrite, ruthless and tough with the slaves, as the author mentioned in page 98 in the first paragraph “ while the slaves masters took to their sitting rooms, book-lined libraries, and private clubs to affirm their gentility, the drove their slaves relentlessly, often to the limits of exertion.”
The author also stated that the violence wasn’t only common in slave society,but it was also systematic and relentless; the planters’ hegemony required that slaves stand in awe of their owners. Slaves in plantation societies were the extension of their owners’ state in ways they never were in societies with slaves. They treated them in an inhuman way, they used to only give orders and slaves had to obey as the kids obey their parents. Slavery in North America was color-coded, what causes plantation regime imposed racial notions. The competition between the slave and their enslavers was a competition with no ending.
They were trading slaves as they’re not humans, they were competing to enslave more, the more slaves they owned, the more prestige they got. Slavery was everywhere even slaves can be found in distant places from where they came from.
Then slaves’ identity started to change over time,Africans started to join together and began to form a new culture out of the old world and the new one but the cultures they were creating weren’t unified because the mainland wasn’t unified.
That shows how the world is always so harsh starting from the old world till our day today. The author showed many details on how slaves used to suffer and how they were taken away from their homes,family and their whole life just to carry out orders from their enslavers.
I appreciate the sense of outrage at the injustice of slavery that comes through this post, something we all should share. In a few places, though, unclear sentences detract from your meaning; while in others, you reiterate words or phrases form the reading without putting them in your own words or making fully clear that you’ve understood. For example, in paragraph 3, what does Berlin mean when he says that slaves in plantation societies were “an extension of their owners’ estate [not ‘state’] in ways they never were in societies with slaves”? How does he suggest the rise of plantation regimes caused or contributed to the racial “color coding” of American slavery?