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Article: Slavery
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
- Author:
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SLAVERY
SLAVERY.
What does it mean to dehumanize a human being? To ponder this question is to approach some definition of slavery, one of the most extreme forms of dehumanization. We know enough about life in the antebellum South to know that slaves resisted dehumanization, that they created a folk culture, a family structure, and a spiritual life that blunted the dehumanizing force of slavery. What was it, then, that made slavery
slavery
?
The problem of slavery, and not just in the American South, was that it defined slaves as outsiders within the very societies of which they were a part. In America this meant that although the slaves got married and formed families, their families ...