Using slavery as a metaphor for white grievances blunted abolition as a revolutionary cause

Evidence

It was precisely because white colonists so well understood the degradations of actual slavery that the metaphor of slavery held so much power to consolidate their disparate interests: no matter a colonist’s politics, background, or class, by being white, he could never fall as low as the Black people who were held in bondage. As the scholar Patricia Bradley puts it in Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution, “Once transposed into metaphor, slavery could serve to unite white colonists of whatever region under a banner of white exclusivity.” The decision to deploy slavery as a metaphor for white grievances had devastating consequences for those who were actually enslaved: it helped ensure that abolition would not become a revolutionary cause, Bradley argues. Instead, the true institution of slavery would endure for nearly a century after the Revolution. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 93

Categorization

• SEED: The metaphor-vs-institution dynamic — a rhetorical device that consolidates one group while entrenching the real thing it borrows from — is a strong essay angle on how language can reinforce the very oppression it evokes. Could trace other ‘metaphor theft’ cases.
• XREF: connects to: Colonial grievances were framed as slavery under arbitrary parliamentary will — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 179