They reserved these rights for humans and called those they wished to enslave "subhuman." Humans do this all the time; they manage to maintain contradictory positions by creating distinctions specifically to allow these sorts of loopholes. In some ways, we can't blame philosophy for this, but philosophy does have a long tradition of trying to define humans, as we've seen in previous chapters. This makes it easier to deny human status to certain groups, since they often use non-biological criteria to define humanity. Race, however, is a biological criteria. There have been attempts to show that certain races aren't "really human" and equate miscegenation with bestiality. We now dismiss race as a species criterion and cultural construct, but
