Masters and Overseers used the whip the slaves not just to force slavery but also to enforce a distinction between their category of people and the whites. The enslaved were even whipped infront of the whites. The overseers whipped them hardly while supervising the slaves to work in the fields so as to achieve the desired level of profit by the planters. The overseers sometimes had to be inhumane to the slaves because they were pressurized by plantation supervisors to extract more profit from the fields.