Whenever you think of slavery, most people will generally go back to the times whenever African Americans were owned by White people for manual labor. Rarely does anyone think of much else, or perhaps anything softer such as a butler or mechanic, maybe even just one to take care of the horses. Not all slaves are treated in an abusive or even degrading manner, even if their owners may have been exceedingly rude.
However, have you ever thought about the slavery depicted in fantasy or even sci-fi stories and universes? It is interested to think about the fact that we have normalized the idea of slavery in a bad context, not to say that I think it should be depicted in a happier or good light, but you nearly always see it used as a card in the deck of some sort of “Evil Overlord’s” arsenal of bad choices.
Furthermore, it is interesting to see in some universes the use of non-human beings as slaves, such as things like goblins or kobolds. Does this make it any worse or better when not using other humans, and rather a race that is not our own?
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After reading your post Jacob, I agree that it is sad to see that there are almost no positives when it comes to slavery. When most people think about slavery, they think about slaves picking cotton, but as you said that is not always the case. Some slaves were butlers, maids, and nannies that never went outside to pick cotton. Plus there were some masters who never mistreated their slaves. Olaudah Equiano’s story gave examples of that when he talked about some of his masters. Though, when I try to think about positives in slavery, I do believe slavery gave us our economical strength and helped test our moral fiber, which I find to be positive since those are things that have affected my life, but besides that slavery is quite grim.
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I agree a lot with what you are saying in your comment. We as a whole have never felt empathy or sadness for a goblin, for example. Whereas if a human or animal were a slave, we would root for their freedom through the whole film or book. We need to start viewing things in other perspectives because many of us these days do not. Maybe we need to start looking at things through a whole new viewpoint.
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