So what exactly makes slavery so horrendous? Well, definitions are slippery, but I'm going to start with the definition of slavery proposed by sociologist Orlando Patterson. It is the permanent, violent, and personal domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons. According to this definition, a slave is removed from the culture, land, and society of his or her birth and suffers what Patterson called social death. Ultimately, then, what makes slavery slavery is that slaves are dehumanized. The Latin word that gave us chattel also gave us cattle. In many ways, Atlantic slavery drew from a lot of previous models of slavery and took everything that sucked about each of them and combined them into a big ball so that it would be the biggest possible ball of suck.