With the exception of the most egregious cases, slave-owning and non-slaveholding white men and women were not held accountable for such crimes beyond a possible fine—say, the estimated value of the deceased slave if she or he belonged to someone else—though their actions would have been punishable by death if their victims had been free and white. White women were members of slave-owning communities built on a system of white supremacy and the subjugation of African-descended people. The laws governing these communities gave slave-owning women the right to make enslaved people submit to their
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