Slavery’s meaning was psychological helplessness beyond mere labor 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

• XREF: Echoes the ‘psychological’ dimension of racial subjugation that recurs through the early chapters on ideology.