House slaves actively contested their servitude despite their privileged position.

Evidence

On the other hand, Owens reminds us that: “Masters tortured and murdered some domestics, and house slaves killed slaveholders. Many acts against domestics went unpunished… . It is not easy to generalize about house slaves. They were a diverse class of bondsmen who helped to shape and reshape the character of their servitude in the Big House. In some respects theirs was a special kind of enslavement marked by privileges that most field hands never experienced, at least not in the same way. They did not, however, give in to it.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1890

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the Sambo stereotype Blassingame critiques in the same note — a contested historiographical exchange about slave resistance.