"And so, when you think about, How does a white person in 1850 own a cow? Well, it's not because there's a policeman standing behind waiting to arrest anyone who touches the cow... property, in general, isn't so much a relationship between a person and a thing; it's a relationship among people about a thing. Enslaved people are participants in the same system of property that white people are."
"The needs of slave owners and the regular interactions between slaves required legal relationships. This use of the law by Black communities flourished, even under slavery and Jim Crow... rights are regularly enforced even without government intervention."
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