justadude1

No doubt you are right. I'm sure the slavers had all sorts of tactics, and opinions about both their tactics and the enslaved, which were wrong.

The author seems to be positing the "easiest" explanation for why a particular opinion took hold among the slavers. Personally, my parsimonious explanation would be groupthink/received wisdom. Which, if it had to have a "legit" origin, was probably a multitude of factors such as you describe.

But, I'm not the author, and was just trying to explain why I don't think that passage is the heinous smoking gun that so many people think it is.

I have read it and I don't think the author is an outspoken advocate of slavery.

The passage most frequently cited as evidence of this charge is:

Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not. This broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously explained by genetic differences.

A charitable reading of this, in my mind, goes:

Some slavers had an opinion about who made good slaves and who didn't. If one wanted to rationalize a basis for that opinion, which historically existed, the easiest/laziest answer would be genetic traits common to the populations in question

Check the definition of "parsimonious" and assume the author used it on purpose.