This gets at the famous metaphor of a fish asking, "What is water?" If a slave spent his entire life on one plantation with a few dozen other slaves — at most — and had limited interaction with other people and places, to what extent would he have understood his condition? How obvious would it have been that his life was not "normal"? Would he have understood the extent of his exploitation? To what degree would he have known what race was?
Enslaved persons were very aware that they were slaves, and of the outside world. Plantations were not closed systems, and even when enslavers tried to prevent it, news from the outside world circulated easily throughout the slave states. This older answer should be relevant for you as it looks specifically at the Haitian Revolution and how news filtered through the United States, and how knowledge of it impacted the enslaved community.