e ôNegroes are naturally inclined toward theft, larceny, lust, laziness, and treasonö (emphasis added), it became easy to conclude that servitude was a good, natural state for the Black race. Other racist commentators, when examining the incidence of slavery in French colonies such as Saint-Domingue (Haiti), noted that the European slave merchant, though an active trader of human beings, could not held be responsible for the existence of slavery (Raynal vii). On the contrary, this position insisted that because African society was naturally barbarous, and because the Black race had been designed for servitude, that therefore the subjugation of the race was a consequence of nature, not humanity (Raynal ix). Slavery, for Blacks, was viewed as a positive condition.
Represented in this ideology is an in
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