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What Is The Life Of Frederick Douglass Dehumanized

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In The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass depicts his life through emotional, physical, and mental abuse by these slaveholders. Both the slave and the slaveholders are affected in dehumanization. One can coincide with Douglass that slavery had dehumanized both slaves and their slave holders.
The slave and slaveholder are making actions based upon false truth. Living on false ideas about life, and how it should be lived. Life is being damaged for others’ lives on both parties. The slaveholder, being born into a world thinking he is superior and has higher power over others. The slave was brought into a dark world starting from a slave’s birth, this cruel process leads to a repeated cycle of abuse, neglect, and barbaric treatment. All of his life, he has to fight through the hardships like Douglass did and be brought down to a …show more content…

The government allowed slavery and so the people accepted the way the government worked and they did not think with their own minds, so most people lived by the way the government was encouraging them to live. Americans were brainwashed thinking that if the president owned slaves then so could they and this dehumanizes the slaveholder because they did not view slaves as humans. Douglass explains in his book, “The slaveholders have been known to send in spies among their slaves, to ascertain their views and feelings in regard to their condition” (36). This quote describes how the slaveholders still keep tabs on their slaves to make sure and check in on them to see how well their slaves are doing. Before slavery took complete effect, Sophia Auld, Douglass’ masters wife had been nothing but kind and caring to Douglass while helping him learn to read. Once she had noticed the power of being a white slaveholder, depriving the black man, she had altered into a malevolent

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Dehumanization is the process of making a human feel like they aren’t a human anymore, making them feel like they aren’t worthy. The Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass has a lot of dehumanization from one slave to all of them. Slaves are systematically dehumanized as a result of their treatment, their daily life, and their inability to have their basic needs met. Dehumanization is a very big factor in this book and this represents everyone in this book, mainly the slave masters. In the book, the slaves don’t get the privilege to learn how to read.

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In the narrative “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave”, Frederick Douglass shows the religious irony in southern slaveholding culture. Douglass gives the reader personal accounts of how brutally some slaves were treated on the plantations. Douglass also contrast the differences between southern and northern slaveholding culture. In the appendix, Douglass argues that there a major differences between Christianity shown to us in the South and Christianity shown to us in the Bible. Douglass gives us personal insight to the life of a slave and their treatment.

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1838 Words | 8 Pages

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