Ok I was gonna put this in the tags but
How is hostage worse than slave?
Hostage is a temporary situation. Hostage is something someone can negotiate you out of.
American Slavery was so much worse than hostage. There was no escape not just for you but your family and all their descendents.
No one takes you hostage and then says by the way, your children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren are also going to be hostages.
But that's how American Slavery worked.
Yes, we absolutely need to be more clear about the brutality of Slavery in America and use percise terminology, but that starts with making sure people understand that Slavery was NOT indentured servitude. Slavery was not people working in exchange for a place to live and food to eat. Slavery was not a house servant. A slave was not a hostage.
Hostage is also not justified by race. The whole mental rational for slavery is so much sicker, darker, and rot at the core of our country than the word hostage can ever imply.
If you asked do I want to be a hostage or do I want to be a Slave in the American South I would pick hostage 100% of the time, because even if I don't get freed and get killed *it still only affects me* choosing Slave means my children and their children and their children are also now slaves.
We do NOT need to find a word more horrible than Slave.
We need to remind people that Slave IS horrific.
We need to de-sanitize the word Slavery.
Also, slavery us not an old antiquated word. There are still slaves.
If the word Slave is not evoking horror in people, and making people think "only something that happened in the past" we have a big problem.