I was watching a documentary short about slavery with my son a few weeks ago. The documentary did an excellent job of presenting the history and contextualizing it. However, there was a segment of the documentary that cut away from the history and launched into a a brief advocacy piece for the use of ‘enslaved person’ instead of ‘slave’. I remark upon this because the advocacy was well thought out and premised upon an actual concern. Thus, it avoided the usual “do as I say” attitude of the typical woke language police. (It was also delivered by a Black person instead of a snotty, woke, white PMC type so I gave it serious consideration.)
The argument went as follows. When discussing slavery, we should use language that ephasizes that we are taking about a person with a status and not making the status (i.e. being enslaved) our primary concern. ‘Enslaved person’, by explicitly using the word ‘person’ reinforces that when we are talking about slaves we are talking about people. On the other hand, when we use the word ‘slave’ we are only implicitly talking about people. The danger in leaving the person implicit in the term is that we may think of enslavement as an essential part of the person who is a slave. Put another way, ‘enslaved person’ maintains a separation between the person and the status while ‘slave’ leaves them combined.
This is a good argument. It may seem nitpicky at first, but it captures one of the subtle ways in which English works. When someone wishes to dehumanize a group of people, one of the first steps is to disassociate the people in that group from their humanity. The US military has done this. In the Vietnam war,1 the Vietnamese resistance became “Gooks.” During the US “war on terror” Muslims became “Hadjis.” Why does this happen? Because it is easier to get a soldier to kill «insert epithet for enemy du jour here», than to kill a fellow human being. Witness the use of ‘orcs’ to describe Russian soldiers invading Ukraine.2 This is in fact how all racial epithets function.3
I ultimately think the word ‘slave’ is the better word choice however. As much as I agree with the argument made concerning people first language in this case, it has two serious drawbacks.
The first drawback is that using the phrase ‘enslaved people’ runs the opposite risk of using the word ‘slave’. Where using ‘slave’ runs the risk of hiding the fact that enslavement was not essential to the people so enslaved, ‘enslaved people’ runs the risk of minimizing the perception of the horrors of slavery.
Stop here and make a quick gut check. Just hearing or reading the words, would you rather be a slave or an enslaved person? At least if you are an enslaved person, it sounds like you might still be treated as a person.
Except slave owners most certainly did not treat slaves with any humanity. Even if some slave owners were more humane to the people they enslaved, this humane behavior was wholly at the sufferance of the slave owner and could be withdrawn at any time and for any or no reason. In other words, you cannot claim credit for treating a person like a human being while simultaneously claiming to own them. The truth is, under US chattel slavery, slave owners could do whatever the hell they wanted to those whom they enslaved without any consequences. Slavery was worse than just making people work for free, which in itself is bad enough. But every slave was subject to rape, experimentation, being sold and separated from family and community, and even recreational murder.
That is, if ‘slave’ can hide the humanity if the enslaved person, ‘enslaved person’ can conceal the true horror of being a slave. At this point, I would be agnostic about which term to use. Whichever term you choose, you will have to be mindful of what that term conceals.
But there is another problem with using ‘enslaved people’ which also derives from the way English (and perhaps all languages) work: syllable count. ‘Slave’ is a simple, one syllable word that we associate with one of the cruelest, most evil systems imposed by one group of people over another in known history. There is no mistaking the word. It is a punch to the gut.
By contrast, ‘enslaved people’ is a four syllable mouthful. George Carlin performed a piece about the expanding the number of syllables when coining euphemisms. You can find it here. Watch all nine minutes of it because it is the most important lesson in linguistics and rhetoric you will ever receive; I’ll still be here when you get back.
When we create a euphemism, the more syllables we add the more we distance ourselves and our audience from the subject. With each additional syllable enunciated, more audience members tune out what we have to say, and the less immediate the phenomena we wish to discuss becomes. In fact, the more syllables we use the more a phenomena like slavery becomes merely a phenomena as opposed to an evil that was perpetrated on actual people. Or as George Carlin once wrote:
Poor people used to live in slums. Now 'the economically disadvantaged' occupy 'substandard housing' in the 'inner cities.' And a lot of them are broke. They don't have 'negative cash flow.' They're broke! Because many of them were fired. In other words, management wanted to 'curtail redundancies in the human resources area,' and so, many workers are no longer 'viable members of the workforce.' Smug, greedy, well-fed white people have invented a language to conceal their sins. It's as simple as that.
George Carlin, Napalm and Silly Putty [2001].
My own lived experience as a litigator is that one should prefer straightforward words with emotional punch over more complicated words and phrases. This holds true whether I am trying to persuade a jury, a judge, another attorney, or anyone else. If I were arguing for prison reform, I would say “prisoners are treated like slaves here.” I would not say, “prisoners are treated like enslaved people here.” The first sentence creates a vivid image of how the prisoners are treated, the second would leave my audience at best with a more abstract notion, and at worse scratching their heads about what an ‘enslaved person’ is. I can imagine someone in my audience asking, “enslaved person? Is that like a slave?”
And gods forbid we follow this linguistic pattern to its conclusion. Otherwise we will be saying “the people who are in prison are treated like enslaved people.” From there its a short jump to “the people who are in the correctional facility are cared for like enslaved people.” At that point, our audience will either have no real idea of what we are talking about or think that it sounds pretty good. I mean we are talking about people being cared for in a facility right? Beats being homeless, or as some forward thinking people are saying, “people who are currently unhoused.”
As such, I think ‘slave’ is the better word choice, but do caution you, the reader, to be mindful to keep the person separate from the condition of slavery when doing so.
For the pedantic reading this, I know that Vietnam is not legally a ‘war’ because Congress did not declare it. But it was a war nonetheless.
No doubt the Russian soldiers have their own dehumanizing terms for Ukranians. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to investigate what those are.
It is important here to note that ‘slave’ is not a racial epithet. One can use ‘slave’ to degrade a Black person on account of their race. However, a racial epithet is a word that is inherently degrading. That ‘slave’ can be used in a dehumanizing manner means that we have to pay attention to the way the speaker uses the word and the context in which they use it.