History question this is what I was asked can someone break it down for me I

I

Independent and Strong

New member
don't understand!? Examine the paradox that slavery often involved intimate and personal relationships between individual whites and African Americans (exemplified by the photo of the slave nurse with white child), even while it maintained a strict and often violent system of control over the slaves as a group. Why do you think this "paternalistic" element of American slaveholding was so important to southerners' self-justification of slavery?
 
All they want to know is...why did slaves love their charges (the children they cared for) and why the white slaveholders used this love as an example of why slavery was not wrong.
 
White southerners justified slavery in part because they argued that black people were incapable of sustaining themselves without them and their social structures.

In other words, the argument ran, a slave supposedly lived a better life serving them and being looked after by them then thy would as a poor, isolated farmer/laborer. Southern slave owners, according to this argument, were good fathers looking after their dependents who would theoretically act irresponsibly if left on their own.

Anyone committing any misdeed needs a way to rationalize it. Southern slave-holders were no exception.
 
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