The practice of blaming victims has been around since power dynamics emerged in society. The treatment of police brutality victims, usually those who are people of color, and sexual assault victims are clear examples of victim blaming today. Questions like “what were you doing that provoked them?”, “what were you wearing?”, and “why didn’t you fight back?” take the blame from the attacker and place it onto the victim. This concept can easily be applied to horrific traumas from the past. In particular, the act of slavery in the south during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. People ask the same questions that they do today in order to invalidate the victims. “Why didn’t they fight back?” Those who use this argument in order to blame the enslaved people for their own enslavement overlook the fact that many of them did fight and die for a chance at freedom and those who …show more content…
If the runaways were not killed when they were found they would be severely punished upon arrival back to their previous master. The novel covered many horrible slave owners but the Litch brothers are especially sick-minded. Mr.Litch regularly killed his slaves because he had plenty to spare and liked to come up with new ways to torture them, like by burning them with melted fat from cooking meat, and his brother who had bloodhounds that were trained to rip the flesh from runaway slaves (41). There were plenty of unnamed masters or slave owners that were just as cruel. In the case of James, an enslaved man who escaped after a bad lashing, he was killed as his punishment after he was caught a few weeks of freedom later. He was brutally whipped over one hundred times and then stuffed into a cotton gin and died there (43). James was beaten, starved, shunned, and his body eaten by rats after he bled out while stuck in the cotton gin. The constant threat of these reputations frightened many enslaved people into subservient