Slave Mentality Essay

Submitted By ahudson1990
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The enslaved people were more dehumanized than the holding class. Slavery constitutes that men and women of the enslaved holding class were dehumanized by slavery. Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be sold or bought. It is a physical or mental bondage to keep the san individual from progressing. Slaves only knew what the slave masters shared with them and wanted them to know. The enslaved people were more adaptive to their environment more so as a culture. From birth the slaves adapted to a slave mentality, it became more of their culture due to the fact that’s all they knew was to obey their master or endure cruel and harsh punishment. Slave masters felt the need to dehumanize slaves making them feel less of a human. In the narrative Douglass gives several examples of the enslaved being dehumanized deprive of their human qualities.
Fredrick Douglass depicts dehumanizing several times in his narrative. Dehumanizing deprives a human of their qualities and rights as humans. Douglass also illustrates in chapter 2 pages 120 of the narrative the way the song makes him feel. “The having of those wild notes always depressed my spirits and filled me with ineffable sadness I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now afflicts me; while I am writing these lines, and expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. Those songs I traced Douglass’s first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery.” The purpose of slave songs were to help slaves work together and form of cooling communication that only slaves understood. He explains that he did not fully understand the meaning of a slave song where he was a slave, but after he was a free slave he understands the evil of slavery and how the slave master used language and cruel punishment to dehumanize slaves of human rights.
Fredrick Douglass depicts dehumanizing several times in his narrative. It is common in slavery for children to be
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