e sick slaves could have been spared and sold in the Americas for a profit. The insurers aren't there to stand up and defend the black slaves; they are there to protect themselves from having to pay 5,109. The lawyer for the insurers constantly refers to the black slaves as stock, but in the next sentence he talks of how many men, women, and children could have lived and been productive slaves. How in one breath can a person be stock and the next human? "Africans are categorized as stock, but it has been long recognized by civilized people that they are only labeled so for their conveyance from Africa to the plantations and not because they are actually equal to animals. English society is replete with examples of Africans who conduct themselves in a civilized manner. Mr. Wilkes was interrupted by loud laughter." (p. 142)There is a small amount of people who recognize that blacks have rights and that they are not much different from us, but even those who recognize this are still placing them far below the whites. This recognition isn't even remotely a change in the way people think. It is more an ignorance of the fact that blacks can be smart and civilized and rather a belief that no matter how civilized or smart, they will never match up with whites. White people believe that the blacks weren't meant to be smart, but rather were meant to be workers of the land. When whites see a black person, they think how much money could they get for him. If one was educated, it was an isolated occurrence and that person was basically still invisible to the white person. There was an acceptance of the blacks being human, but it was obvious that they were considered in a different breath. Blacks were human but they weren't people. They were stock, the same type of stock as say maybe horses or sugar canes. So the acceptable treatment of blacks when they were stock was completely different from when they were civilians in England. The ...
