Slavery As A Mythologized Institution Summary

In the short essay “Slavery as a Mythologized Institution” Frederick Douglass works hard to debunk the mythology behind the idea of slavery. In order to do this Douglass discusses how the South in a way romanticized slavery and treated it as though it was okay because the Bible said that it was. When in reality that was not a justifiable reason to enslave African Americans, but all this did was dehumanize them.

When trying to justify the act of slavery in the South, the Southerners turned to the Bible in order to do just that. Douglass discusses how the Southerners felt as though passages “1 Timothy 6:1-2; 1 Peter 2:18; Ephesians 6:5-9; Colossians 3:22-24:1; and Genesis 9:18-27” justified the right for slavery. One passage they used in particular was Genesis 9:18-27, in this passage they use dissentience of Ham to say they were destined for slavery based on the name Ham that supposedly meant “black.” The people of the South also tried to romanticize the idea of slavery. They did this by saying that “the slaves were happy being slaves” when in reality that was not the case. When the slaves would sing is was not out of happiness or out of joy for the way they were living. But

This meant that they also thought they were an inferior race compared to whites. One man describes them as "the white man's burden" and some whites even believed “that slavery was a means of protecting” African Americans. When in reality they were being deprived of basic human needs and treated like objects not human beings. Slave owners would not have kept slaves uneducated if they felt as though they were being protected. By keeping them uneducated they kept them powerless and inferior to their masters.Which meant the African American “would lose all reasoning power if kept under slavery.” Instead of protecting them like some thought they were doing the masters were actually only hurting their