Defenders of slavery argued free-coloreds were ingrates created by masters’ generosity

Evidence

As Raimond, Grégoire, and others understood all too well, abandoning colonial policy to the planters meant condemning free-coloreds to political exclusion and unchecked discrimination. How, they demanded, could the National Assembly allow one group of France’s citizens to so flagrantly oppress another group in this way? How could the planters who had so long oppressed the free people of color be allowed to decide whether they could exercise their natural rights? The response from Moreau was that masters had in fact shown great benevolence and humanity to the free people of color. It was, after all, the generosity of white masters that created the class in the first place, and the free-coloreds demanding rights were little more than ingrates supported by uncomprehending zealots. Segregation, Moreau argued, was inevitable and beneficial. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 287

Categorization

• DEFINE: This shows the slaveholder ‘gratitude’ argument being used to justify racial exclusion—a durable trope worth recognizing in other contexts.
• XREF: Moreau’s ‘ingrates’ framing against the ‘generosity of white masters’ is structurally identical to later paternalist justifications of racial paternalism.