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What Does Frederick Douglass Mean To Say The Powerful Are Powerless

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The rich leaders of this country are blinded by money and power, whereas The common people who struggle, can see clearly. This is shown in literature such as The biography of Frederick Douglas. Frederick Douglas along with the other slaves wanted to be left alone and left at peace but the powerful owners were peace less and hard on the slaves.A motto that I created to describe this is "the peaceful are powerless, because the powerful are peace less". This is why the slaves were oppressed. Along with their traditions and culture.This cauused them to go blind to their old life and old ways of living. Frederick Douglas' had yet to go blind and he kept his focus on his goals. His goals were not power, they were goals for freedom. This led him to the realization that he needed to know how to read. …show more content…

She was cruel and hateful. Just another person blinded by the affects of power. Douglas was her personal servant for years and Sophia was nothing but kind to him. But after the years went by she began to change. This change was not pretty she started coming down like the wrath of God. She became a matriarch that was nothing but cruel. Just like her husband who loved to beat slaves and cause them pain in any way. He hated slaves in many ways. This slave holders name was mr.severe, his name is a perfect description of his personality. He beat the slaves and got a jolly out of it. He was blind from the slaves pain . He was blind to it because he refused to see the truth, he was blind because of the rush he got from the power . He could control any slave and he loved it. That's why he became blind from being power hungry along with being a control freak. This caused many problems but no one would stand up to

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Douglass uses paradox to demonstrate that slavery degragrates the slaverholder. When Douglass under Mr. Sever’s care he described that: “He was less cruel, less profane… He whipped, but seemed to take no pleasure in it. ”(Douglass 24). Most slaveholders are characterized to be cruel and inhuman because of the whipping and the way they treated the slaves.

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Douglas composes “It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me… I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it” (Page 169). White slave proprietors made it unlawful for slaves to peruse and think of, this numbness kept them in a condition of limbo which halted their development. Without the ability to inspect their circumstance, they didn't change their circumstance and stayed in this wheel of mistreatment and

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Douglass believed that freedom for freed slaves was the ability to make decisions, regardless of the outcome, for one’s self. At the time, many white legislative members, both from the north and from the south, believed that laws needed to be made to regulate the former slave population. The North sought to save them from themselves, while the South attempted to control them back into a form of slavery through sharecropping and forced employment. Douglass instead insisted that the white populace should “Do nothing with us!” and that “[i]f the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are…disposed to fall, let them fall!”

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Four thousand and two hundred religions exist in the world each supposedly guiding their followers through commandments, decrees, and customs. The largest of all these religions that impacted the American culture is Christianity. Pioneering with the Salem Witch Trials to the various cult movements that still materializes on the news, some people have a tendency to manipulate religious teachings or abuse their powers for leverage over others. Frederick Douglas writes in depth about fanatic ideologies of slave owner combined with warped interpretations of religious text furthermore, he demonstrates how sudden irresponsible power can corrupt one's ethics. Frederick Douglas wrote about the various people that owned him and a slave owner that

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This trouble is rooted in a legacy we all inherited, and while we’re here, it belongs to us (Johnson p.12). People rarely talk about power and privilege because talking openly about it isn’t easy. This keeps us from looking at what’s going on and what makes it impossible to do anything about it. People are naturally afraid of what they do not know.

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Because of slavery, Douglass explains the hypocrisy of the

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Frederick Douglas paints a vivid picture in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas of the daily struggles that slaves went through in antebellum times such as working extremely long hours, being whipped for any reason their master demeaned necessary, and the constant threat of being separated from their families. Firstly, Slaves were expected to work as long as their master’s wanted them to work. They ordinarily worked sun up to sun down, but during the harvesting season they would often have to work long into the night and still have to be up at sunrise the next morning to work. For instance, according to Douglass, “We were often in the field from the first approach of day till its last lingering ray had left us” (972). Another hardship

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Masters basically taught their slaves that they didn’t have any worth and humanity, that’s how he was raised as a slave, to be less than what he is. As a young slave he didn’t know much and that was normal. Masters wanted slaves not to know much of their status so they was quite clueless. Masters kept the slaves clueless so that they wouldn’t stand up for themselves. Slave owners wanted the slaves to know that in fact they were very to the slaves.

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She'll get it whether I give it to her or not.” This shows his obvious disregard to see her as a human being. To him, she's hardly even human and doesn’t even deserve a second thought. Another example of a slave being treated inhumanely would be in the part of the story describing a slave, “Weylin called her a good breeder, and he never whipped her.

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Of course, she was evil. Nothing ever mattered to her. She wanted to be her and all about her. She always found a way to get what she wanted. She was rude to others and disrespectful.

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Shes been beaten, whipped, and just plainly over worked her whole life. She later decided to be brave and try to escape slavery. She succeeded in escaping the attack. She

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A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world”(Douglass 34). The masters think that if the slaves can learn just a little, like reading, then the slaves will take even more like learning how to write and how to communicate better. Mental violence towards these helpless slaves was not needed through being uneducated because this made them helpless in their potential to their work they could have done, they were only useful for the easy jobs on the farm and in the house babysitting, when some of these strong slaves had a huge potential of being great, hard workers. Violence by keeping the slaves ignorant to the open world was crueler than the physical whippings the slave masters gave

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The Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass shows the imbalance of power between slaves and their masters. In his book, Douglass proves that slavery is a destructive force not only to the slaves, but also for the slaveholders. “Poison of the irresponsible power” that masters have upon their slaves that are dehumanizing and shameless, have changed the masters themselves and their morality(Douglass 39). This amount of power and control in contact with one man breaks the kindest heart and the purest thoughts turning the person evil and corrupt. Douglass uses flashbacks that illustrate the emotions that declare the negative effects of slavery.

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After being separated from his mother at a young age, Frederick Douglass fights back against slavery and human rights. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, the author, Frederick Douglass, uses powerful rhetoric to disprove the Pragmatic and the Scientific pro-slavery arguments of Pre-Civil War America. The Pragmatic Argument is about how many people believe that if all black slaves were to be freed, then this would result in convulsions which would then lead to extermination of the one or other race. Many people also believed that black slavery was necessary for American history.

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Because of this, he successfully creates a contrast between what the slave owners think of and treat the slaves and how they are. Douglass says that slave’s minds were “starved by their cruel masters”(Douglass, 48) and that “they had been shut up in mental darkness” (Douglass, 48) and through education, something that they were deprived of, Frederick Douglass is able to open their minds and allow them to flourish into the complex people that they are. By showing a willingness to learn to read and write, the slaves prove that they were much more than what was forced upon them by their masters.

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