The injustice of slavery
This book is essentially one long argument explaining why it is impossible to defend American slavery from any point of view (many have tried). The act of enslaving another person is inherently unjust because it presumes that one person's life can be essentially worth more than someone else's, and worse than that, it also implies that black people are less than human. In the American south, slaves were treated like animals, and not only were they denied human dignity, they were also manipulated into compliance through systematic torture, both physical and emotional torture. Many people were brutalized, raped, murdered, because of slavery.
The need to remember the harsh truth
Some people feel the need to sugar-coat history so they can feel more comfortable with history, but in this case, it is crucial that every person look right at the facts, so that they can do the difficult work of determining whether they have properly eliminated racism from their own point of view. This book argues that no matter what a person wants to believe about slavery, the facts are plain and clear. Anyone who protects slavery as a quaint cultural feature of the old South is either uninformed or willfully ignorant.
The frequent mental and bodily torture of slaves
This book catalogs frequent, methodical, strategic torture of slaves, for the explicit purpose of manipulating them into slave behavior. En masse, the slavers were human traffickers who had perfected the art of subjugating a person through mental humiliation, bodily torture, and emotional destruction. So, these stories are not only a picture of slavery—they are also an argument against forgetfulness. The book explains why it is crucial for every American to remember that real human beings were made to suffer so extremely at a systemic level.
