On the Pleasures of Owning Persons by Volney Gay (IP Books, 2016) is a book written for white Americans. The author is a professor in the Departments of Religious Studies, Psychiatry, and Anthropology at Vanderbilt University and is a training and supervising analyst at the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute. He employs what he calls “applied empathy” to give an account of the minds of American slaveowners through understanding the pleasures they derived from owning slaves and the ways in which they tried to deal with the contradiction between owning slaves and seeing themselves as freedom-loving Christians. He positions his book as part of the effort to understand the effects of hierarchies that the powerful have created, focusing here on the divided minds of the powerful.