I agree with your hesitancy, James. However.
I think Whitehead did a very good job describing the mental state on which U.S. slavery was built.
I thought that the most unsettling parts of the book were those describing the honorific cruelty against captured runaway slaves, cruelly that often served as lunchtime entertainment for the puritan masters and a stern warning to their remaining slaves.
This cruelty was made possible by seeing slaves as ‘non-persons’. Even where salves were liberated, like in North Carolina, they were often turned into state property, and, as such, were fair game for biological experimentation.
Slave hunters continued to operate in ‘free states’, where slavery was prohibited, on the premise that the sanctity of property trumped over the sanctity of life. These hunters acted like ‘private’ IRS or FBI agents, with trans-border privileges, to find and return runaways to their ‘legal owners’.
Finally, and perhaps most devastatingly, the slaves themselves often lacked the most basic sense of self. Families disintegrated, children were sold, parents were murdered. There was no ‘community’, let alone a stable one, so there was no social locus to relate to and construct one’s own social personality.