The loving-family mask justified slavery by separating equal souls from unequal bodies

Evidence

In paraphrasing St. Paul, Perkins became one of the first major English theorists—or assimilationist theologians, to be more precise—to mask the exploitative master/servant or master/slave relationship as a loving family relationship. He thus added to Zurara’s justifying theory of Portuguese enslavers nurturing African beasts. For generations to come, assimilationist slaveholders, from Richard Mather’s New England to Hispaniola, would shrewdly use this loving-family mask to cover up the exploitation and brutality of slavery. It was Perkins’s family ordering that Puritan leaders like John Cotton and Richard Mather used to sanction slavery in Massachusetts a generation later. And it was Perkins’s claim of equal souls and unequal bodies that led Puritan preachers like Cotton and Mather to minister to African souls and not challenge the enslavement of their bodies. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 76

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete early specimen of the assimilationist position: affirm spiritual equality, accept bodily/subordinate inequality.
• SEED: An essay tracing the ‘equal souls, unequal bodies’ split from Perkins to modern claims of spiritual-but-not-social equality would apply Kendi’s scheme to contemporary debates.
• XREF: Mirrors the ‘grafting’ metaphor’d paternalism of exploiting relationships reframed as family — echoes the sacrifice essay’s mechanism of masks. — connects to: Slaveholders justified slavery through a divinely ordained patriarchal family hierarchy — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 236