I attended a lecture in college wherein a contrast was made between the Enlightenment, when thoughts of fraternity and human rights spread, and the North Atlantic slave trade, which seems not to match the spirit of the Enlightenment. The lecturer’s thesis was that for this to happen, slave traders needed to spread the idea that the slaves were somehow sub-human and not deserving of fraternity and human dignity. Art work and advertisements, for example, would show slaves as ridiculous sub-humans. And the lecturer showed a bunch of such images on a projector. And I wonder if this helped lead to American slave practice being different from previous slave cultures which accepted the basic humanity of their slaves.