My grandmother's family owned slaves in the 1800's. She said the goal in treating slaves is to instill fear in the slaves and differentiate the owners’ culture. How else can a few people control a large number of strong, angry people? Slave owners were afraid of slaves, so the owners hated the slaves.
Here's a description of slave treatment in the American Colonies:
'General Elements in Slave Treatment
The treatment of slaves in the United States varied widely depending on conditions, time, and place. Generally speaking, urban slaves in the northernmost Southern states had better working conditions and more freedom than their counterparts on Deep South plantations. As slavery became more entrenched and slaves both more numerous and valuable, punishments for infractions increased.
Treatment was generally characterized by brutality, degradation, and inhumanity. Whippings, executions, and rapes were commonplace, and slaves were usually denied educational opportunities, such as learning how to read or write. Medical care was often provided to slaves by the slaveholder’s family or fellow slaves who had gleaned medical knowledge via ancestral folk remedies and/or experiences during their time in captivity. After well-known rebellions, such as that by Nat Turner in 1831, some states even prohibited slaves from holding religious gatherings due to the fear that such meetings would facilitate communication and possibly lead to insurrection or escape.
Isolated exceptions existed to the generally horrific institution of slavery. For instance, there were slaves who employed white workers, slave doctors who treated upper-class white patients, and slaves who rented out their labor. Yet these were far from common occurrences.'
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-ushistory/chapter/slavery-in-the-u-s/
That culture of hatred survived the Civil War and became the GOP today. We see the racial fear and resulting hatred spreading across the country.
'SOUTHERN CULTURE
The formative elements of cultural cognition are ubiquitous in the legacy of slavery. The system rested on stratification, rigid social barriers, insularity, and superior force. The American theory of slavery entailed complete subjugation to power in exchange for life itself; the resulting problematic was, in Orlando Patterson’s words, “How does a society, any society, come to terms with the idea of socially dead persons in its midst?” (1991:11).
The answer is through embedded social mores, legal codes, and shared beliefs to create a mode of denial that slaves were human. In the case of Africans transported to the United States, slave society was rationalized as a manifestation of the Great Chain of Being in which hierarchy was part of the created universe, and the foreordained status of conquered Africans allowed slave owners to explain the ownership of “inferior” beings who were located between white persons and apes in the natural order of things. Indeed, “the popularity of the concept of the Chain in the eighteenth century derived in large measure from its capacity to universalize the principle of hierarchy” (Jordan 1968:228). The hierarchical order was so entrenched in slave society that ownership of black beings was merely a variation of property in livestock and other chattels (Jordan 1968:232–35).
Accompanying the cultural scheme of slavery was a complementary vision of rank, status, and worth attaching to the individual within the social matrix. White males occupied a unique role at the apex of the pyramid, but the precise quantum of worthiness was allocated to the man himself. W.J. Cash declared in his classic study of the mind of the South that “the dominant trait of this mind was an intense individualism—in its way, perhaps the most intense individualism the world has seen since the Italian Renaissance and its men of ‘terrible fury’” (Cash 1941:31). Individualism was coupled with a code of honor that supplied the ethical basis justifying the “racial and social bondage that first made temporary chattels of white servants, then made permanent slaves of African imports.
From the start, slavery and honor were mutually dependent.” (Wyatt- Brown 1986:ix). To the extent necessary to defend an individual’s status, violence could be deployed in the service of honor. The concept rested on adherence to social rank and was enforced by any necessary amount of force against others. Slaves occupied the bottom rung of the order, with white men at the top and white women in between. Slave owners mediated their contradictory ideals of civic participation and exclusion based on race and gender by dichotomizing “public” and “private” life; households were managed as patriarchal enclaves distinct from the sphere of public affairs (Tomlins 2010). Under the Southern code of honor, individuality, and masculinity, secession was the only acceptable response to Lincoln’s election in 1860 (Olsen 2011).
Core cultural values in the United States are besotted with racial attitudes. The geography of culture follows lines of demarcation lowing from the Old South and into states of the West, as reflected by right-to-work laws. The elaborate system of race domination marking the Jim Crow era from 1877 to 1964 reinstated the essentials of the antebellum order, penetrating American life and indelibly stamping our social and political structures (Woodward 1974). Social historian Daniel Rodgers in his discussion of race and social memory describes an incident in 1986 when a young black man was beaten to death in Brooklyn because he crossed into the “wrong” neighborhood while responding to an advertisement of a car for sale (2011:111). A more recent case involving the death of Trayvon Martin, a young black man, skewed racial attitudes and sharply differentiated responses about race relations. As the Wall Street Journal reported, “Optimism over race relations in the U.S. has slid since its historic high in January 2009, when 77% of Americans polled—79% of whites and 64% of blacks—described such relations as good. In the new poll, 52% of those polled felt that way, including 52% of whites and 38% of blacks” (King and Ballhous 2013).
The defining features of the Confederacy mesh seamlessly with the cultural cognitionists’ description of hierarchy and individualism in the “group–grid” formulation. Americans’ cultural orientation is a contemporary expression of deeply sedimented values laid down at the formation of the Republic; the mechanics of slavery took root in the first waves of colonization and remained indelibly fixed in our constitutional scheme until the Civil War (Dred Scott v. Sandford 1857; Tomlins 2010). The ongoing relevance of culture for labor unions can be traced from the first attempts at national legislation during the New Deal through contemporary examples of governmental and judicial hostility to working-class solidarity. A historical perspective explains the deleterious conditions that confront modern unionism and the tightly knit connections among slavery, race, culture, and collective action. From the outset, those conditions were embedded in federal labor policy.’
Chapter 2: 'The Persistent Efects of Slavery in the United States: Culture, Legal Policy, and the Decline of American Labor Unions'
Raymond L. Hogler
THE DISUNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Employment Relations Systems in Conflict.
Copyright © 2014 by the Labor and Employment Relations Association. Printed in the
United States of America. All Rights Reserved. No part of the book may be used without
written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and
reviews. First Edition ISBN 978-0-913447-09-3
LABOR AND EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS ASSOCIATION SERIES
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