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The Effects Of Slavery In The Narrative Of Fredrick Douglass

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Cynthia Keo 12/22/2022
Room 303 Slavery; Is it flawed? ELA

“You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”
― William Wilberforce

I ask you to think of this question, and to use your judgement, from the perspective of both slave and enslaver; is slavery ethical, righteous, and noble? In the Narrative of Fredrick Douglass, Douglass experiences ignorance being used in slavery, being withheld an education due to his race, the effects of slavery changing someone's moral compass, and distortion of a …show more content…

Most noticably, his first account of the effects slavery had, was seeing slave masters selling and beating their own children, because they were darker and are counted as slaves, because their mothers are slaves. Most children conviced from this ordeal, are children, whos mother has been raped, for profit and pleasure, and was the norm in society to sell slaves, even if they were family. In the text, it says "And, cruel as the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell his own children to human flesh-mongers, it is often the dictate of humanity for him to do so; for, unless he does this, he must not only whip them himself, but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but few shades darker complexion than himself", and it also says "In all its glaring odiousness, that slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that the children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers; and this is done too obviously to administer to their own lusts, and make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable". We can infer that the text is talking about those who are mixed, and what happens to their mother and them, only because they're African American. This shows how slavery is an unethical, corrupted, and flawed

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