Sure you can. The but robots would not have any issue with that. And the cruelty is the point. Slave owners in the South didn’t simply own slaves because it was economically a great system. By most accounts slave ownership the way it was done in America was far more costly than just hiring people at slave wages (which is still pretty bad but when splitting hairs…)

No, they owned slaves because lording it over a person you can definitively (in your own mind) label as inferior makes you feel good.