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. Stan, am I allowed to say suck on this show? Nice. Okay, to understand what I'm talking about, we need to look at some previous models of slavery.