Again, this OP is inspired by a private PM that I received. The quote involved is as follows:
"...learning English isn't a benefit. Not whenever its because if you don't learn English you'll be fucking whipped, second of all, it was a reputation thing in early America, especially near the civil war, as slaves were seen as property and therefore needed to be able to perform, that means they were given enough to eat most times."
The school-taught U.S. slavery oppression narrative is riddled with flaws, and in this OP I will address some of them.
Firstly, I'd like to say that I don't condone slavery and I actively will speak out against it. However, in regards to the slavery conditions of the United States, slaves were treated quite well, relative to the bogus official narrative peddled in U.S. schools.
Eating
American adult slaves were actually quite well fed, so much so that they actually grew to be slightly taller than their slave owner's (apart from English aristocrat and Swedes) https://www.jstor.org/stable/2121481?seq=1 . This work is behind a paywall so I gathered the relevant table here https://i.imgur.com/DKvGFFk.png . Therefore, the evidence suggests that slaves were not "given enough to eat most times", but they were "well fed", thus treated well in this regard.
English
Saying that "learning English isn't a benefit" is, quite frankly, a ridiculous statement that flies in the face of universal standards -- the Human Development Index has "literacy" as a component. In other words, the whole world agrees that literacy is important. In the 1870 census, African American slaves had a literacy rate of over 20%. Comparatively, Russia only had a literacy rate of 15% at this time https://ourworldindata.org/literacy . Further comparison shows that Africa, as a continent, didn't reach 20% literacy rates until 1950. Thus, in terms of literacy, Africans were better off in the United States.
Adjusting for the context of the era involving slavery in the United States, learning English was a benefit because it allowed some of the more talented Africans to become emancipated an integrate into American society. It also helped the slaves to communicate in general.
The claim that Africans were "whipped" if they didn't learn English, flies in the face of logic: why would you buy a slave to abuse and whip him/her? Similar to how well we treat cows, despite owning them, whipping your cow/slave would cause injury and thus stymie his/her ability to produce milk/work for you. Not to mention the official Wikipedia page suggests that teaching slaves English "was discouraged" and made illegal in certain Southern states https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_during_the_slave_period_in_the_United_States . Also, data on the brutality of slave owners to slaves is very hard to find (perhaps because it doesn't exist).
Performance
it's true that slaves were expected to perform, but that doesn't mean they were whipped and worked hard. A study in 2015 by Trevor Logan found that his children were able to pick cotton at 95% the rate of the average, same-age slave *child* https://i.imgur.com/xnAtnnS.png . Add to this the fact that the average free farmer worked 3,130 hours a year, whilst the average black slave worked 2,798 (Fogel and Engerman, 1977).
Thus, slaves worked fewer hours than White free farmers and weren't worked particularly hard.
