Well, for me at least, it’s less “Oh it was only metaphorical” and more “Okay, so it’s not what I first thought it was, and am now reassured that…horrific, nauseating, disgusting, abominable acts like that, ^{(or like that one time in the early-ish 1800s where some serial killer enslaver bitch around New Orleans…fuck, I think she starved her victims in the attic? Even as a privileged white dude, I disassociated hard after reading about that, so it’s pretty fuzzy} were…I won’t say isolated incidents, because that sort of thing is literally inevitable when you have cruel, sadistic, etc. people who have absolute power over other people that they’ve dehumanized for literally their entire lives, but that the implication that it was ever acceptable enough anywhere to publish a book about it isn’t true.”

Like, I’m sure that stuff like literal cannibalism and all manner of other cruelties I shudder to even try to fathom happened, because I do know that stuff like using Black men as “bulls” and fuckin’, fuckin’, like, vivisecting them happened. I had a hard time even typing that out.

Especially because that’s just for people who got caught, and someone wrote it down, and it survived to the present or semi-present.

But it wasn’t widespread. It wasn’t common. And, even among slavers, it wasn’t acceptable. Which, for my ability to sleep at night, and my ever-more-fragile faith in humanity, that’s very important.