Pro-slavery Southerners openly proposed enslaving only infants as a corrective reform.

Evidence

The implications of these examples, of course, were clear to his readers: that in all times, in all countries, whites have been naturally in a state of dominance fulfilling their God-given role to direct the labor of others. As the superior human species, whites are protecting blacks from likely worse fates by enslaving them in a benevolent environment. Finally, at least one major source of resentment among enslaved Africans in America was the result of a purely tactical error that could be corrected: that the slave traders made the mistake of abducting teenagers and adults rather than small children and babies who would not recall a previous state of freedom. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 239

Categorization

• CANDY: A searing fact-level absurdity: a theologian’s ‘practical fix’ for slavery was to enslave only babies so they never knew freedom.
• DEEPTHINKING: The passage exposes how reformist ‘humanization’ of an atrocity can intensify rather than mitigate it - here, by perfecting the timing of abduction.