queerhawkeyes:

I’m having a hard time with the whole ‘well the plantation owner supposedly treats the convicts nicely so it’s okay’ thing. that sounds almost identical to (white) people who want to sanitize slavery and think that if a slave owner was “nice” then it was okay. and yes, thomas was not a slave, but labor camps are still a form of incarceration, and if you are not being compensated for your labor and you are not free to leave, then what are you? like the point isn’t that this plantation owner probably adequately fed the “workers” and didn’t beat any of them to death, the point is that they are not free. yeah it might have been worse in the prisons in England, and it’s surely better than the treatment black slaves faced, but that doesn’t make it okay? and I just can’t see Flint, who wanted to free all of the world from Britain, accept it just because they could be facing worse elsewhere.