This article is about a specific set of rules enforced by a government, to single out one type of person, for the rest of their life. Indentured servitude should not be equivocated with slavery, which, by contrast, is for life, and was inescapable by law.
Actually, in pretty much every developing society cattle are considered prized ownership and are treated well and cared for. Farmers with thousands of sheep or cows still try to avoid the loss of even one.
Slaves were treated far worse than that. Perhaps like some used trash you were selling to a junkyard.
How can you know that? Do you have book references or something?
Yes, racial slavery was a terrible evil. But it wasn't genocide, which has a specific definition (intention to wipe out a specific people). Slave traders wanted enough people alive to sell at a profit.
The scope of the death toll was large, but spread over a long period.
From Wikipedia:
> Approximately 1.2 – 2.4 million Africans died during their transport to the New World. More died soon upon their arrival.[1]
Over 300 years.
Compare to other genocides[2], which murdered similar numbers (or much more) but happened over just a few years.
Maybe you meant "worst" in the sense of most injustice? It certainly stands out, but it doesn't hold a candle to the death inflicted on a colossal scale by the governments of the 20th century during both war and peace. Estimates place Stalin's body count between 3-9 million.[3] WWII civilian deaths are estimated at 50 million and included the genocide of the Halocaust.[4]
Slavery is evil, but war is so much worse.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_tol...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_deaths_in_the_Soviet...
Instead you made some argument that they are trying to argue that it wasn't that bad, which is not based on a literal interpretation of their comment.
Can you believe white supremacists use the same kind of thinking? They also toss around the word genocide where it does not apply, assuming one against whites. If you were to say what the commenter said, they'd do the same: Instead of engaging the arguments based on merit, they'd accuse you of wrongthink.
Better to let people be honest and judge argument's on their merit rather than start accusing people of wrongthink so easily. Perhaps this is a pretty big problem in the politics right now.
If it becomes impossible to correct the definition of words without being branded as a wrongthinker, then what good is that going to do?
genocide - systematic killing of a racial or cultural group
Kidnapping a single ethnic group from their homeland and accepting that some percentage of them will die while transporting them in cages sure sounds like genocide.
If we want to call it genocide, it would be more likely genocide of one African tribe towards another.
Note that this isn't to paint a picture of "look at these African savages killing each other", but only to highlight that historically members of the same ethnicity (at least the modern definition of "ethnicity") are rather eager to kill each other over resources (and moral differences to cover it up). Europeans, Asians, indigenous Americans etc were all quite successful in constant tribal warfare at various degrees of scale, there was nothing special about Africa here. In fact you could say that the Soviets were the most successful people in the history of the world at exterminating their own kind for one reason or another.
They didn't. You have to understand that African slaves were seen as cargo, not human beings. A good percentage would die every single time, and be thrown overboard. This was just accepted as part of the cost of doing business, the same way chicken breeders ship baby chickens in the mail today with the expectation that some will die in transit. The few that die off are more than made up for in profits by your ability to jam as many as possible into one shipment.
It's one of those facts that really makes the transatlantic slave trade stand out as perhaps the worst genocide in human history. It wasn't just killing. It was the industrial scale treatment of millions of human beings as cattle for over 300 years.