system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Asians have also been slaves in the U.S. and this isn’t mainstream education in this country.

Asian indentured servants, or “coolies” as a derogatory term, have been used as a source of cheap labor in the United States as early as the 1800s.

While indentured servants are different from slaves because they have paid contracts, in the case of Asian coolies (and also many indentured African servants in the Antebellum South) they were oftentimes duped into free labor or sold to another employer in the States where their original “contracts” were voided. 

“In practice, however, as many opponents of coolie labor argued, abuse and violence was rampant. **Some of these laborers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers,** while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts.”

On the Pacific Passage:

“As many as 500 were crammed into a single ship hold, leaving no room to move. **Some of these were Chinese women kidnapped to be sex slaves under the demand of American and Caribbean plantation owners.**”

(Both cited from Wiki)

**More compelling to me when asking if coolie labor was a form of slavery, is how the California state government eventually came to define it in its 1879 Constitution:**

**"Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void.”**

Interestingly enough, Abraham Lincoln also signed “An Act to Prohibit the ‘Coolie Trade’” months before his Emancipation Proclamation.

**Edit:** It’s been fascinating to see the debates about this oscillate back and forth from “no they weren’t slaves” to “yes they were and everybody learned about this in school.” Which is it?

**Edit 2:** Bolded the important parts, since people don’t seem to be reading my OP and think I’m talking about indentured servitude.
gpt
There were plenty of European indentured servants too... Do you also consider them slaves?

There is definitely an argument regarding working conditions and pay rates...but it is hard to make the argument it was slavery if:

* It was voluntary
* It was paid
* It was for only an agreed upon length of time

Now, if people were taken against their will, or not properly paid, one could make the argument that that person suffered a form of slavery... That is very different from equating the entire practice with slavery though.