A surplus of grain, a papal bull, and four million in the cotton South

Slavery, the essay says, appeared naturally as agriculture and settled life began. Once a society was organised and a surplus of produce appeared, a structure of subordinating other people arose as a way of securing labour. Early on, war captives and criminals were the main people enslaved, and they were bought and sold as property. People then, the page says, treated a slave less as a person than as a resource needed for survival; early documents already show that idea.

Ancient civilisations, it is no exaggeration to say, were built on slavery. In Sumer, Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome, slaves existed officially through law and institution. Even philosophers in Greece held that some human beings were ‘born to be slaves.’ Rome, through large wars of conquest, reduced many peoples to slavery. They were used for housework, and also in mines, on farms, in the army, and even as instruments of entertainment. Rebellions were frequent, and empires answered with a stronger oppression. In some regions, the page notes, the number of slaves reached half of the whole population.

In the Middle Ages, slavery existed in various forms. Christianity and Islam were involved and gave an ideological justification. The Catholic Church forbade the enslavement of Christians, while making an exception of pagans and Muslims. Pope Nicholas V, in the bull Dum Diversas, granted the king of Portugal the right to enslave pagans. That later became a moral basis for the Atlantic slave trade, and a logic also appeared in which forced conversion through enslavement was treated as a means of saving a soul. In the Islamic world, too, slavery settled as part of the economy and of society, and slave markets spread from Central Asia to North Africa. Religion, in this reading, rather helped the expansion of slavery, and was used as a means of justifying the conquest of pagans.

From the fifteenth century, as the age of exploration began, slavery spread on a worldwide scale. Portugal and Spain began to export African slaves across the Atlantic to the New World. Those people were used mainly on plantations, growing sugar, tobacco, and cotton, and suffered extreme labour. They were often not people who had been kidnapped, but war captives from inside Africa, or people supplied through trade between tribes; local African elites were also deeply involved. Spanish colonists had enslaved Native Americans, then, after a decline in population and international condemnation, turned to Black slaves. From the nineteenth century, slavery was gradually abolished, but its influence, the page says, remains deep. In the American South, slavery was maintained into the 1860s, and, for cotton cultivation and for economic gain, the number of Black slaves reached four million. After official abolition, practical discrimination and oppression continued. In a modern form, the essay also names illegal trafficking in persons, forced marriage, child labour, and sexual exploitation as a new slavery. Some countries, it adds, still have, in practice, hundreds of thousands of slaves even after legal abolition; Mauritania is the example given on the page, and is left as that page states it.

A fifth year, a 2024 count, and a mural taken down in Houston

A contemporary section rests on a newspaper article. According to that article, the United States had reached the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s death, and racial discrimination remained serious and had, if anything, become more fixed. The writer is reminded of the 1857 decision of the federal Supreme Court, in the case of Dred Scott, an enslaved Black man, that a Black person was not a citizen and had no standing to sue in a federal court. American society, the essay says, has still not completely stepped away from that legacy, more than a hundred and sixty years later. The figures that follow are left as the article reports them, in their own window, and are not recast as later official totals. The article is a Kyunghyang Shinmun piece of 26 May 2025, by Bae Si-eun.

In Minneapolis, where Floyd died after excessive force by the police, thousands of citizens and activists gathered for a memorial, but the prevailing judgement was that racial inequality inside the country had not improved. A Pew Research Center survey, published on the 7th in that article’s window, found that social interest in race had increased after Floyd’s death, but that Black lives had not substantially improved; 72 percent of respondents shared that view. Support for Black Lives Matter had also fallen. In June 2020, just after Floyd’s death, 67 percent of all respondents said they supported the movement; in that later survey the figure had fallen to 52 percent. As interest declined, related symbols were also disappearing. Washington, D.C., had, in the March of that window, removed large lettering from a street known as Black Lives Matter Plaza, and a mural of Floyd’s face had been destroyed in the demolition of a building in Houston. A New York Times analysis of data gathered jointly by The Washington Post and the non-profit Mapping Police Violence found that at least 1,226 people were killed by police in the United States in 2024. That was 18 percent more than in 2019, just before Floyd’s death. Among Black people, 6.7 per 100,000 were killed by police, and among white people 2.5, a large gap between the groups. The same article discussed the policy of President Donald Trump, who, at the start of his term in January of that window, had signed an executive order ending policies of diversity, equity, and inclusion, on the ground of ‘reverse discrimination against white people,’ and who, on the 22nd, had cancelled Harvard’s certification for a programme for international students, stripping those students of a qualification to enrol.

The writer first saw, on YouTube, a video of a Black man dying with a police officer’s knee on his neck, and felt a shock and an anger that could not be put into words. To use that kind of excessive force on a person who was offering no resistance was, to the writer, a clear violation of human rights. The scene felt less like a mistake by public power than like a symbol of a racial discrimination deeply rooted in American society. The impression that, only because he was Black, a person was more easily treated as a criminal, and more heavily met with violence, could not be shaken off. That one scene, the writer says, spoke the reality more strongly than a statistic or a theory heard in the news. The points, the writer thinks, touch the long history of slavery in the United States. For nearly four hundred years, the country bought and sold Black people as property, and treated them as less than human. Even when institutions and a constitution changed, that way of thinking did not completely disappear, and remains, in a different form, until now. The officer’s posture, with a knee pressing down, felt not only like a physical restraint, but like a metaphorical repetition of an old way in which a white person had dominated a Black person. And this kind of discrimination, the writer adds, is not only an American problem; it still exists worldwide. Judging and discriminating against someone by appearance — by the colour of the skin, by origin, by language, or by religion — can also be found around us. Floyd’s death, then, is not only a fault of the American police; it asks all of us to look again, and asks whether the writer has judged someone by appearance or by a prejudice, or has looked on and done nothing.

A jewel of innocence, and a friend on Hellotalk

From James Baldwin’s ‘Stranger in the Village,’ a sentence that came close to the writer is this: every Black person, in relation to every white person, takes a stance that in fact intends either to take from the white person a precious innocence, like a jewel, or to make him pay a dear price for it. The sentence was striking because it shows clearly that racial discrimination is not only a problem of inequality or of violence, but an emotional conflict that rises from deep inside a person. Behind the outward attitude there are, the author said, anger, fear, contempt, and a strategic response, tangled together. The wording about taking a precious innocence came to the writer as a meaning that the very gaze with which a white person looks at a Black person may be a naive illusion, and that, in the moment that gaze changes, the white person feels that their world is threatened — because a white privilege has been treated as a matter of course, and turns, when it is challenged, into anger or fear. A Black person, in this reading, is not only a ‘victim,’ but someone who must constantly regulate themselves and remain conscious of a white gaze and a white judgement. Their feeling must be held down; their anger must be expressed strategically; and, in some cases, it is turned into a deliberate compliance, or into a way of making the other pay a price.

Another sentence that came close is that, at the base of the American Black problem, white Americans, even in order to live while keeping their self-respect, need to find a way to live with Black people. The more a white person turns away from that coexistence, or avoids it, the more they also fail, the writer takes it, at a reconciliation with themselves. E. Franklin Frazier’s wording, as given on the page — to find a motive to live in American culture, or to die — was not, the writer says, a real choice. It was a forced creation of an identity for survival, and the being called an ‘American Black’ that was born from it could never become a free subject cut off from their own past.

Closing the assignment, the writer wondered whether their own thought about Black people had been too fragmentary, and found in the work a chance to understand more deeply the history and the structure of discrimination, and to look back at themselves. While learning English on the Hellotalk app, the writer met a Black friend. He said that Koreans often look down on Black people. The writer was at first startled, then came to think that the words might be true, and that they too may have judged someone, without quite meaning to, by appearance or by the colour of the skin. What came most strongly was that the history of slavery, and the structure of discrimination that continues from it into the present, is not only a matter of the past, but a reality that still lives among people. A Black person, the writer came to see, is not only a victim, but someone who has lived, even under oppression, with a complex feeling and a strategy in order to keep themselves; even their anger, their silence, and their keeping of a distance were ways of surviving. Discrimination, the close holds, is not a problem unrelated to the writer. Anyone can take on a fixed idea, and the writer is not an exception. From now, the writer says, they will try not to be silent or indifferent, and to have an attitude that receives a difference as it is.

Why a papal bull, a cotton count, and a fifth year are kept together

A number in the cotton South, and a survey in a May 2025 newspaper, belong to the years in which they were written. The same Korean essay, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Essay on the history of Black slavery in America, from the birth of slavery to its institutionalisation, with a contemporary article and a reading of Baldwin (Korean source page).
2. Pope Nicholas V and the bull Dum Diversas; the Atlantic trade; four million enslaved people in the American South in the 1860s; the 1857 Dred Scott decision.
3. Bae Si-eun, Kyunghyang Shinmun, 26 May 2025; Pew Research Center and Mapping Police Violence figures as reported in that article; James Baldwin, ‘Stranger in the Village’; E. Franklin Frazier, as quoted on the page; Kim Jeong-won, a study of Toni Morrison’s novels, doctoral dissertation, Chonnam National University, 2001.

Last updated: 14 November 2026