Frederick Douglass
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No one can argue the horrors of slavery. I always immagined that slavery was the worst thing possible that could happen to a person. .That was until I took this class and read the book about Frederick Douglas.
As an assingment I was to write a paper and I had three topics to choise from. I was stuck between writting about the worst thing about slavery and what impact it had on what I thought I knew about slavery.I have watched many shows that depicted slavery as a harsh life. I have had black friends who could tell me storeys their great great grandparents once told. I knew it was not pritty before the book, but after it only opened my eyes to how bad it was.
After a while I finnally decided which topic I wanted to write about. “How does what Douglass says about slavery compare to your previous knowledge of the subject?”. You would think with just that sentance the worst thing would be being the slave to begin with. Any person would wish to be free , just like any living thing would.
From Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I began to understand slavery a lot more. Douglass had hated the way slave owners would encourage their workers to drink themselves into a stupor during Christmas holidays. He saw alcohol as another means used to humiliate slaves.And this was something that I did not know. I only knew that the earlie Americans applied alcohol to native American Indians but I never knew that they applied it to the African slaves also.
Douglass also wrote in the Narrative. “For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others. It was my unhappy lot not only to belong to a religious slaveholder, but to live in a community of such religionists.”
He went on to say later that ,“I love the pure, peaceable, and impar- tial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the cor- rupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plunder- ing, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”
This too I had no knowledge of. I would think that any true Christian would see humans no mater what kind as equial. I mean didnt
they come to America because they wanted religious freedom. But Douglass exposed the bitterness of racism ands its absurdity at the same time that he imagines the fullest possibilities of the natural rights tradition, the idea that people are born with equal rights in the eyes of God and that those rights can be protected under human law.
Additionally, we can look to the bible when God spoke with Abraham (Genesis 15;13) . He foretold all kinds of disasters for Abrahams descendants,not that the Africans are linked to Abrahams descendants but you would think God was talking about them as well saying: They will be strangers in a land not theirs. They will serve as slaves. They will be tortured. It is clear from this that torture and slavery are considered separate afflictions. Enslavement even without any physical hurt or pain is