Both defenders and opponents of slavery argued through Aristotle’s natural-slave doctrine

Evidence

In the late Medieval Age, the defenders of slavery, whether the issue was the enslavement of Europeans, infidels, “Indians,” or Blacks, frequently turned to the pages of Aristotle to justify slavery as a natural condition of some parts of mankind. In the early sixteenth century, when Fray Bartolome de las Casas converted from colonialist to anticolonialist pamphleteer, it was Aristotle whom he was forced to confront and use for his own purposes: … He described Aristotle as “a gentile burning in Hell whose doctrine we do not need to follow, except in so far as it conforms with Christian truth.” … … But … Las Casas equally applied the Aristotelian model to “prove” that the Indians were rational beings, not one whit inferior to the Spaniards or any European, ancient or modern for that matter, but in some respects even superior to Europeans. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 503

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader arc of how European thought grounded racial hierarchy in classical sources, relevant to understanding the ideological foundation Robinson argues the Black radical tradition arises against.