Slavery’s distinct meaning was psychological subjugation, not only economic exploitation.

Evidence

[T]here was in 1863 a real meaning to slavery different from that we may apply to the laborer today. It was in part psychological, the enforced personal feeling of inferiority, the calling of another Master; the standing with hat in hand. It was the helplessness. It was the defenselessness of family life. It was the submergence below the arbitrary will of any sort of individual, (p. 9) [The South’s] subservient religious leaders reverted to the “curse of Canaan”; [its] pseudo-scientists gathered and supplemented all available doctrines of racial inferiority; [its] scattered schools and pedantic periodicals repeated these legends … — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 934

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader interest in the Black radical tradition’s dual understanding of oppression as both material and psychological/ontological.

Related

• Slavery’s meaning was psychological helplessness beyond mere labor exploitation. (similarity 0.95)
• Slavery gains historical meaning only when read as labor, not as bondage. (similarity 0.82)
• Slaves formed their own consciousness independent of planter ideology. (similarity 0.81)
• Slavery altered slaves’ conditions but could not negate their being (similarity 0.81)
• The slaves’ revolutionary consciousness constituted a historical force against racism and capitalism (similarity 0.80)
• The Black radical tradition draws its raw material from preserved African consciousness (similarity 0.80)
• Slavery’s meaning was psychological subjugation beyond mere economic exploitation (similarity 0.80)
• Western religious doctrine gave slavery its highest moral sanction (similarity 0.80)
• Black revolutionary consciousness derives from the whole historical experience of Black people. (similarity 0.79)
• Slavery’s ideological scaffolding was necessary for its persistence and expansion. (similarity 0.79)
• Black theorists of the twentieth century were formed by the phenomenology of slavery (similarity 0.79)
• Enslaved Africans carried intact cultural systems, not deculturated minds, into slavery (similarity 0.79)
• Black labor’s post-slavery mobility opened its subcultures to ruling-class penetration (similarity 0.79)
• Black resistance to enslavement came from African identity, not slave status (similarity 0.79)
• A scientific-philanthropic rationale was fabricated to justify Negro slavery. (similarity 0.78)