Life Talk With Craig Lounsbrough

Slavery as an institution is pretty far removed from the minds of most of us residing here in 21st century America.  Slavery sits back plenty far enough in the faded, yellowed and brittle pages of history to create a more than comfortable chasm between us and itself.  We view that chasm of time and social development and modernism as broad enough to keep slavery from leaping from the past across the chasm of time into the present.  The idea of slavery seems to evoke dusty black and white tin-type images of the Civil War, the expansive plantations of the Deep South, bloodied chains, inhuman whippings, lynching’s, and wild-eyed slaves fleeing through swamps, thick underbrush and the wilderness of their own fear. Those kinds of pictures have become our definition of slavery; the visual that creates a picture of what slavery is.  Slavery is seen as a physical captivity that coerces a forced service to an enslaving master.  That’s how we view it.  That definition is nearly exclusive, making our definition of slave