To the pirates

Recebemos esse texto de um dos pirates da faculdade. É o mesmo texto que o Adriano cita em sua carta. Vale a pena ler.

Pirates' relationship to black sailors was peculiar. On the one hand, pirates' attitudes toward blacks don't appear to be different from their lawful contemporaries' attitudes toward them. Pirates took slaves, held slaves, and sold slaves. On the other hand, some pirates displayed significantly more tolerant behavior toward blacks. Upward of a quarter of the average pirate crew may have been black. Many of these sailors were former slaves and at least some os them were treated on equal terms with white sailors in the pirate crews they sailed with. They had equal voting rights in the pirates' democracy and likely received an equal share of the pirates' plunder. This is specially remarkable since, on the surface, pirates had nothing holding them back from enslaving black sailors they captured - bondsmen of free.

The simple logic of the "dispersed benefits and concentrated costs" of slavery on pirate ships may explain pirate tolerance. Since the benefits of enslaving a black sailor on a pirate ship were divided among its many free crew members and a substantial part of the potencial costs of enslavement, namely the increased odds of a pirate crew's capture, was borne fully by each free crew member, pirate slavery was sometimes unprofitable. This wasn't always true. But sometimes the invible hook led pirates to display a racial progressivism in practice that didn't accord with the racial views in their mind.