Here's my post in response to nittanyalum's post from the other thread:
Quote:
Originally Posted by nittanyalum
They weren't "servants", it was "debt slavery".
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The point being that slavery after 1865 was usually called by names other than "slavery" (for obvious reasons). In fact it was often called "servitude" or "captivity" or "emprisonment." Or they would even claim their slaves as family members and use that to justify the enslavement and the slaves' inability to leave. James Brooks's work makes this very clear, although he's working on very different forms of slavery in the southwest and not on the material you've brought up.
I'm willing to recognize that there is a semantic issue here, right? So the people who were enslaving in this period didn't call what they were doing slavery for a variety of reasons, but we can recognize that it was, in fact, slavery. We do this today pretty frequently. For example, we call child soldiers in Africa slaves even though their masters don't speak of them that way. I do think it's important, however, to recognize the difference in words and think about how differences in words affected the reality of people's lives... I do think language matters even if we want to constantly speak truth to power. Even if we all decided ultimately to call it "captivity" and not "slavery" (which James Brooks uses semi-interchangeably in his book), we can all recognize that it was a pretty great evil... I hope.