# Were slaves ever allowed to “retire” **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 10, 2020, 6:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647 "2020-10-10T18:07:24Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![urbanredneck2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/5f8ce5/32.png) [@urbanredneck2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/urbanredneck2)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2020, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/101 "2020-11-09T18:50:21Z")
I dont think American slaves were cheap, or “throw away”. As I recall a slave baby was worth about $5 and a top field hand was worth about $800 ([LINK](https://www.measuringworth.com/slavery.php)). That’s much more than a horse cost. Of course that would change with age, skills, physical abilities and if they tried to run away. [THIS](https://www.freetheslaves.net/our-model-for-freedom/slavery-today/#:~:text=In%201850%2C%20an%20average%20slave,about%20%2490%20on%20average%20worldwide.) article says that a top slave in 1850 would be worth $40,000 in todays money. As for “working them to death” they pretty much worked everyone to death back then. Can you imagine working in an 19th century factory, mill or coal mine? And they also worked children to death. It wasnt until the 1900’s they outlawed child labor. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2020, 7:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/102 "2020-11-09T19:23:47Z")
> [@urbanredneck2](#): > > I dont think American slaves were cheap, or “throw away”. As I recall a slave baby was worth about $5 and a top field hand was worth about $800 ([LINK](https://www.measuringworth.com/slavery.php)). That’s much more than a horse cost. Of course that would change with age, skills, physical abilities and if they tried to run away. Whatever they may have cost, as Douglass reminds us in the Chapter describing several brutal murders, > It was a common saying, even among little white boys, that it was worth a half-cent to kill a “nigger,” and a half-cent to bury one. > [@urbanredneck2](#): > > [THIS](https://www.freetheslaves.net/our-model-for-freedom/slavery-today/#:~:text=In%201850%2C%20an%20average%20slave,about%20%2490%20on%20average%20worldwide.) article says that a top slave in 1850 would be worth $40,000 in todays money. According to Kevin Bales (2001), > [@](#): > > In the United States before the Civil War, the average slave cost the equivalent of about fifty thousand dollars. I’m not sure what the average price of a slave is today, but it can’t be more than fifty or sixty dollars. > > Such low prices influence how the slaves are treated. Slave owners used to maintain long relationships with their slaves, but slaveholders no longer have any reason to do so. If you pay just a hundred dollars for someone, that person is disposable, as far as you are concerned… > > And while the price of slaves has gone down, the return on the slaveholder’s investment has skyrocketed. In the antebellum South, slaves brought an average return of about 5 percent. Now bonded agricultural laborers in India generate more than a 50 percent profit per year for their slaveholders, and a return of 800 percent is not at all uncommon for holders of sex slaves. Progress! ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2020, 5:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/103 "2020-11-10T05:54:36Z")
> [@urbanredneck2](#): > > I dont think American slaves were cheap, or “throw away”. Expendable and cheap are not synonyms. Nuclear missiles and Saturn V rockets are expendable, but not cheap. Slaves _not_ being cheap was precisely why their deaths were slowed down. But the intended end point of their working life was death, nonetheless. ---
**Author:** ![urbanredneck2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/5f8ce5/32.png) [@urbanredneck2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/urbanredneck2)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2020, 7:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/104 "2020-11-10T07:59:04Z")
A good story about “modern” slavery (from the 1940’s to the 2000’s) is from [HERE,](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-story/524490/) an article in the Atlantic about a family from the Philippines who “technically” had a slave. Its a complicated history but very interesting. ---
**Author:** ![GreenWyvern](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/greenwyvern/32/2834_2.png) [@GreenWyvern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreenWyvern)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2020, 10:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/105 "2020-11-10T10:44:10Z")
> [@urbanredneck2](#): > > Its a complicated history but very interesting. Thanks. It’s a good story. ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2020, 11:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/106 "2020-11-10T11:09:25Z")
> [@smilingbandit](#): > > In short, my response overall is that American slave-masters may have been in the main cruel, short-sighted, skinflints with hearts of lead. But they weren’t Nazis, and the system survived as long as it did because they were, in general, no more evil than the next man. There were reformers among them, and the did not all have the same views about what slavery was or should be, or whether it should remain at all. Of course they were, on average, more evil than the next man. The literature is pretty clear that slavery was corruptive of the morality of slavers. It corrupted because a fear of violent rebellion normalized shocking violence as a matter of preemptive self-defense. It corrupted because there was no accountability for violent (or sexual) conduct. It corrupted because the dehumanization that was required to justify slavery also reduced empathy. I mean, when I was a kid and we had a cat who had kittens, we eventually found them a home. I remember being devastated at the thought of that poor cat family being separated. My parents explained to me that cats weren’t people and while the mama cat would miss them for a little while, she’d soon forget. It was a nature’s way. And buy and large, I believed her. It stung, but sure. We can’t have 6 cats. Mama cat got over it. This was how white children in the south were raised with regard to slaves, with regard to the children they played with (because, weirdly, every source agrees slave and white children played together. A lot). Family separation, casual brutality, child rape and pregnancy, constant unfair distribution of resources (i.e., the kid you play with doesn’t get clothes or food like you do). All of that was aggressively, deliberately normalized, constantly rationalized as appropriate and ethical–a literal matter of life and death. It had to be. Slavery depended on it. People raised in that environment and who went on to perpetuate it, were not “in general, no more evil than the next man”. Their morality and sense of ethics was deeply, deeply twisted by the institution they depended on. ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2020, 11:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/107 "2020-11-10T11:56:54Z")
Great post, @MandaJO! I don’t like the modern-day tendency to use Nazism as the benchmark of evil. It’s like using Jeffrey Dahmer as the benchmark of criminality. “Oh, they only kidnapped and raped a bunch of people but didn’t kill anyone. Ergo, they aren’t really a criminal!” Bullshit. Just because slavery didn’t literally obliterate a people doesn’t mean it didn’t have genocidal qualities. The system lasted as long as it did not because it was any less evil than Nazism. It lasted as long as it did because the ideology of black inferiority was just that damn powerful and deeply entrenched. Even many abolitionists, including Lincoln, believed it. ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2020, 12:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/108 "2020-11-10T12:23:28Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > “Oh, they only kidnapped and raped a bunch of people but didn’t kill anyone. Ergo, they aren’t really a criminal!” Bullshit. Just because slavery didn’t literally obliterate a people doesn’t mean it didn’t have genocidal qualities. I feel like family separation, even now, gets downplayed. In the primary sources, family separation comes up over and over again, always on par with the beatings, in terms of the horror of slavery. Parents would have child after child taken from them, often far away, and that that was just game over. You never knew what happened. Marriages were not legally recognized and couples were separated routinely–and men were whipped if they objected to their wives being raped by white men. The horror and misery of this–and the constant waiting for it to happen again–dominated slave life. But we don’t really talk about it like we talk about the beatings, for all that most parents would gladly take even the most brutal beating rather than have their kids taken away. In the realm of things I believe but I cannot prove, I’d posit that part of the really deep-seated implicit bigotry in much of the US, those really deep biases that operate well below conscious recognition, is that black people don’t really love their families, especially their kids, quite like white people do. That they are a little more like cats. So black schools can’t be successful, because their parents aren’t as dedicated to their kids’ success. Black dads don’t stay because they aren’t really capable of caring, not like white dads. It’s not that they don’t love their kids, it’s just not quite the same sort of thing. And that idea directly stems from 200 years of rationalizing the absolute horror of family separation. _It’s not as bad for them, it’s not as bad as it looks, they don’t feel like we do._ ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2020, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/109 "2020-11-10T15:51:29Z")
> [@MandaJo](#): > > In the realm of things I believe but I cannot prove, I’d posit that part of the really deep-seated implicit bigotry in much of the US, those really deep biases that operate well below conscious recognition, is that black people don’t really love their families, especially their kids, quite like white people do. That they are a little more like cats. So black schools can’t be successful, because their parents aren’t as dedicated to their kids’ success. Black dads don’t stay because they aren’t really capable of caring, not like white dads. It’s not that they don’t love their kids, it’s just not quite the same sort of thing. And that idea directly stems from 200 years of rationalizing the absolute horror of family separation. _It’s not as bad for them, it’s not as bad as it looks, they don’t feel like we do._ This is deep. And I agree with 100% of it. The only thing I would add to it is that I think it extends beyond how white folk perceive black people’s emotions for their children. Black feelings in general are downplayed in the white American psyche. > **[Racial Bias in Pain Assessment and Treatment Recommendations](https://www.endonews.com/racial-bias-in-pain-assessment-and-treatment-recommendations)** > > False beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites are associated with racial bias in pain perception and inadequate treatment recommendations for black patients’ pain. > What’s Done Here > > - Studies show that many laypeople, scientists, and scholars continue to falsely believe that the black body is biologically and fundamentally different from the white body (e.g. that blacks have thicker skin than do white people or that black people’s blood coagulates more quickly than white people’s blood). > - This study examined whether false beliefs about biological differences are associated with racial bias in pain perception and treatment recommendations. > > Key Results > > - Many white adults without medical training and white medical students and residents endorse false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites, and these false beliefs are related to racial bias in pain perception. > - Furthermore, white medical students and residents who endorsed false beliefs showed racial bias in the accuracy of their pain treatment recommendations. ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2020, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/110 "2020-11-10T16:01:05Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > This is deep. And I agree with 100% of it. The only thing I would add to it is that I think it extends beyond how white folk perceive black people’s emotions for their children. Black feelings in general are downplayed in the white American psyche. Absolutely. And that goes to the same idea: it’s okay to whip a slave bloody because they don’t feel it like other people. They are different, only way to get their attention. This also goes to things like how sexual victimization of black children (especially girls) is taken less seriously: it’s just not seen as damaging in the same way it would be to a white child. It doesn’t hit so hard. So it’s not as big of a deal. ---
**Author:** ![ZosterSandstorm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/e0b2c6/32.png) [@ZosterSandstorm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZosterSandstorm)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2020, 1:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/111 "2020-11-11T01:03:58Z")
> [@urbanredneck2](#): > > As for “working them to death” they pretty much worked everyone to death back then. Can you imagine working in an 19th century factory, mill or coal mine? > > And they also worked children to death. It wasnt until the 1900’s they outlawed child labor. “Look at how bad capitalism in the north is, they’re doing X Y and Z” was a standard argument in favor of slavery from Southern planters in the 1850s and I see it survives pretty much unchanged in their intellectual heirs. ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2020, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/112 "2020-11-11T01:48:01Z")
> [@urbanredneck2](#): > > As for “working them to death” they pretty much worked everyone to death back then. Can you imagine working in an 19th century factory, mill or coal mine? Just how many millworkers, coalminers, and factory workers do you imagine were whipped during the daily course of their labors? How many of them were sold off? I’ve more questions after you answer those two. ---
**Author:** ![urbanredneck2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/5f8ce5/32.png) [@urbanredneck2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/urbanredneck2)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2020, 9:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/113 "2020-11-11T09:34:01Z")
Of course not the same. However have you ever read [The Jungle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle) by Upton Sinclair exposing the exploitation of immigrants and workers in the 1900’s meatpacking plants and other factories and farms? No, workers were not whipped and sold off. But being worked to death, dieing in unsafe working conditions, dieing from lack of medical care, dieing because of poisons in the water and air, forced prostitution and all, is barely an improvement. ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2020, 12:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/114 "2020-11-11T12:15:12Z")
Being able to quit an exploitative job is a HUGE improvement over being enslaved in one. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2020, 12:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/115 "2020-11-11T12:34:47Z")
Not to mention that exploited immigrants can and did move for policies like higher wages, a safe working environment, socialism, and unionization. Whereas a slave who tried to go on strike would be whipped to death. ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2020, 1:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/116 "2020-11-11T13:01:31Z")
And no one took their kids. Slave families were routinely separated. It was common, more common than not, for a woman to have had five or six children taken from her as they reached late childhood. The sheer horror of that cannot be overstated. ---
**Author:** ![YWTF](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/d07c76/32.png) [@YWTF](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/YWTF)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2020, 1:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/117 "2020-11-11T13:45:58Z")
> [@mhendo](#): > > If I had a guy standing over me with a whip every day, I’d do my absolute best to make sure that whipping wasn’t a routine event, and if pushing myself to pick cotton faster was the best way to avoid having my back torn to pieces, then I’d do it. And that’s pretty much the situation described by slave narratives and other evidence that we have from the 18th and 19th centuries I don’t understand why this isn’t universally understood. There is no amount of money anyone could pay me that would make picking cotton all day, every day, in extreme heat or otherwise, an attractive occupation. Absolutely no wage would ever be enough to make me sign up for this jig. None. The only way I would ever do it is if I was forced to do it. And perhaps the only thing that would drive me to do this work _well_ is if the constant threat of violence hung over my head. Meaning, I could expect to receive brutal consequences when my output fell short of what the boss desired. And what the boss desired was to be as profitable as possible. Slavery was the only form of labor that would’ve allowed the South to do what it did in the timespan it did it in. It wasn’t irrational; it was just the opposite. It was ruthlessly _rational_. Slave owners figured out that it’s possible to extract an amazing amount of labor from people just as long as those people have zero rights and zero freedom, and using violence to “motivate” them instead of monetary incentives was a permissible practice. Southern capitalists who were too ethical and compassionate to exploit this reality were significantly less competitive than peers that exploited the hell out of this reality. This is why a war was necessary to end slavery. ---
**Author:** ![casdave](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/c6cbf5/32.png) [@casdave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/casdave)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2020, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/118 "2020-11-11T14:01:40Z")
Whilst this does not resemble the worst of slavery, I think you might consider the widespread use of indentured workers. > **[Indentured servitude](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude)** > > Pages for logged out editors learn more > > Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years. The contract, called an "indenture", may be entered "voluntarily" for purported eventual compensation or debt repayment, or it may be imposed as a judicial punishment. Historically, it has been used to pay for apprenticeships, typically when an apprentice agreed to work for free for a master tradesman to learn a trade (sim... Workers in Bradford in the textile mills were not free to either move to another employer, or even to withdraw labour, indeed those who did withdraw labour would be taken before the magistrates and prosecuted. The most extreme sanction employed was transportation to the colonies, which is how the story of the Tolpuddle martyrs arose. Other means of control were more subtle but amounted to overbearing control and servitude through the use of truck payments where workers were forced into usurious debt through ‘loans’ by the company. Slavery is just the most forcible means of extracting labour and part of a spectrum of compulsory servitude. Th US experience of slavery ties into race more thoroughly than slavery as practiced through most history which makes it even more invidious ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2020, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/119 "2020-11-11T14:37:59Z")
> [@casdave](#): > > Whilst this does not resemble the worst of slavery, I think you might consider the widespread use of indentured workers. Sure, indentured servitude could be terrible. There’s no doubt about it. In fact, one of the points often made by historians about labor in the British North American colonies during the 17th century was that the lives of slaves and the lives of indentured servants were often not that much different from one another. This was particularly the case in plantation societies like Virginia. If you read the records of the Virginia Company, and some of the court documents that are available from 17th-century Virginia, there are numerous instances of indentured servants going to court to protest against brutal treatment at the hands of their masters or mistresses. Beatings and whippings, withholding of food, incredibly long work hours were some of the complaints. Because the magistrates in these courts tended to be wealthy colonists, the type who might have indentured servants of their own, and who would be more likely to identify with the masters and mistresses than with the servant, this meant that the servants bringing these cases often had their claims for mistreatment rejected. In some cases, indentured servitude also came to be more and more like slavery, because masters and mistresses could, and did, take servants to court for alleged laziness or failure to fulfill the contract, and sometimes the magistrate would tack extra years onto the end of the indenture, beyond the originally-agreed period of time. Of course, a couple of differences with slavery emerge in stories like this. First, however badly they were treated, indentured servants had, at least, signed their indenture contracts voluntarily. This doesn’t excuse, and nor should it minimize, the terrible treatment they received, and they often signed contracts unaware of how hard their lives were going to be, but at least they weren’t simply kidnapped and sold to a slave trader; they made the decision themselves about whether to accept the loan, and whether the length of the indenture was an acceptable risk for them. Second, as English men and women, indentured servants had rights, and they did have access to the court system as a potential remedy when those rights were violated. And even though magistrates tended to empathize more with masters and mistresses than with servants, some indentured servants did actually have their rights vindicated in court, with remedies that included reductions in service length, additional end-of-service payouts, and other forms of compensation. Your last point about the connections between slavery and race is important here. One historical interpretation of the dramatic rise in slavery in Virginia in the late 17th century is that those who ran the colony were increasingly worried about class rebellion among indentured servants and landless former servants, as happened in the Bacon’s Rebellion uprising of 1676. While the rebellion was quashed, leaders in Virginia sought to prevent the resurgence of class hostility among English colonists, and in order to do this they began to replace indentured servitude with slavery, and to write laws that more and more explicitly defined slavery in racial terms, and that regulated the lives of blacks more and more strictly, creating a racial divide that replaced the class divide as the most important social and political and civic distinction in Virginia. They added anti-miscegenation laws, outlawing interracial relationships, which had been somewhat common among poor white and black indentured servants and slaves. Poor whites were encouraged to identify with wealthy whites, and to see themselves as free Englishmen in comparison to the enslaved blacks in their midst. This interpretation of Bacon’s Rebellion, and of the efforts to create a race-based rather than a class-based society in Virginia, is most fully spelled out in Edmund Morgan’s incredibly influential book _American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia_, which is required reading for anyone seeking to understand Virginia in the 17th and early 18th centuries. Historians debate over Morgan’s interpretation, and there are disputes as to how important this concern about class conflict was in contributing to the shift to slavery, but almost all historians agree that it was, at least, one factor. There were, of course, other reasons for the shift to slavery in Virginia, including the expansion of the colony and tobacco growing, leading to a need for more and more labor; the increasing health and decreasing mortality rates in the colony, which made slavery increasingly cost effective, compared to indentured servitude; the improving economic conditions in England, which reduced the number of poor English men and women willing to sign indenture contracts and migrate to Virginia; and the growing British control over the Atlantic slave trade, with Britain the most powerful slave-trading nation by 1700, which made slaves more readily available for purchase. ---
**Author:** ![Odesio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/odesio/32/20003_2.png) [@Odesio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odesio)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2020, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647/120 "2020-11-11T15:29:36Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > This is deep. And I agree with 100% of it. The only thing I would add to it is that I think it extends beyond how white folk perceive black people’s emotions for their children. Black feelings in general are downplayed in the white American psyche. I’ve read that black children are often perceived as being older than they actually are by white people which might be one of the factors that lead to harsher disciplinary actions up to and including suspension or expulsion. I think a lot of white people also overplay what they see as negative emotional traits as well and come down a bit harsher because, well, you know, that’s the only way to get _those_ people to pay attention and follow the rules. And I’ll be perfectly honest, I’ve had to check my own behavior in this regard to make sure I’m being fair. And I’ve gotten into arguments with white people who genuinely believe black people have an extra muscle in their legs whites don’t possess or flat out believe black people can’t swim (often saying its because of their dense muscle mass). It’d odd that some of these beliefs persists given how easy it is to find the truth. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647.md?page=5) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-slaves-ever-allowed-to-retire/922647.md?page=7)