I can't remember where I read it last week, but the person discussed how when we think of chattel slavery in the US, we tend to think of massive plantations of cotton or tobacco, with one very rich white master or mistress with lots of land and lots of enslaved people. But we very rarely think of the many families that had just one or two slaves, in smaller homes.
Because it's not like you had to pay them, so once your family owned someone, they owned them and their descendants indefinitely. Could you pay and eventually free em- sure! You could also send them anywhere you want for any labor you want, could have an enslaved woman bred for more children, or maybe save up and buy new slaves and sell the old. Like cattle (thus, chattel slavery).
So it's interesting that many people go "oh well it's not like my family owned slaves!" Because like, one, how do you know that? Have you ever actually asked your grandmas about their grandmas? How many of your family members grew up with mammies? Have you ever asked? I wonder how many people have actually done the digging for the truth (or was it easier to just benefit). Because I've talked to my grandma, who picked cotton in the sea islands. She had to have been doing that for someone in the 1930s and 40s!
And two, it's easy to think that because your family (or someone else's) didn't own sprawling stolen land and generational blood money like a plantation owner, that it wasn't as important. But... It was. That was still someone's entire life. That was a person, whose labor benefitted and saved a family money that could be used in other ventures. How often do we think of them?
The UK version of this is "We didn't own slaves! There were no slaves in Great Britain and anyone setting foot on our sainted shores was immediately freed! We never had a slave society!!!!" BUT they forget that it was ludicrously common for middle class families to own shares in slaves. You'd notionally "own" a couple of slaves (or, you'd own some fraction of a slave) that were working on a plantation somewhere else in the world, and in return for that you'd get a dividend from the company that owned the whole plantation.
It was a normal kind of investment, the same kind of thing as putting your money in the Premium Bonds or in a savings account. But it was harder to "see" so people tend to forget it.
#also in the uk people definitely owned slaves#like literally on english soil#and it wasnt a hush hush under the table thing#there were ads with reward money for escaped slaves in newspapers in the uk#slavery was illegal in the uk the way police brutality is illegal in the us#aka technically but no one enforced those laws <- prev tags (@nerdvanauniverse)
