slave

However, Bibbiani and Maher noted that Denzel Washington is particularly good as Machiavellian former slave, Macrinus, who now profits off gladiators.

Maher said the film "only ignites when Denzel Washington’s brilliant, bisexual slave manager is on screen," he said.

By the 1830s, elected officials such as James Henry Hammond could claim in the halls of Congress that American slavery retained the “advantages” of “the aristocracy of the old world,” adding that “slavery does indeed create an aristocracy — an aristocracy of talents, of virtue, of generosity and courage. In a slave country, every freeman is an aristocrat.”

The concept of “social death” comes from Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, who developed the term some 40 years ago when analyzing commonalities among various slave societies around the world.

Chapter 8 explores Jacobs' narrative "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" alongside Harper’s letters, poetry and speeches as among the most trenchant and still underexplored philosophical commentaries on how the United States might redress the systemic wrongs that conditioned the ideology of racial feudalism.