12/13/2013
Per. 3
The Effects of Ignorance
Throughout his youth, Frederick Douglass served as a slave on the farms in Maryland and in Baltimore. As he grew older, he gained education, more free time than other slaves, and money and eventually made his escape to New York. When writing his autobiography, he takes into consideration all that he's been through but also the experiences of all the slaves around him. Along with focusing on what slaves and slave holders knew, Douglass tends to focus more on what they didn't know and how that had effected them. He discussed blacks and whites’ ignorance towards different things and how what they don't know had dehumanized them. He uses education, Christianity, and the effects on slaveholder for their actions to demonstrate how ignorance has effected both African Americans and slave holders.
To African Americans, slavery IS life. Their whole life would be spent in slavery and there was no way to escape it. Many people in the Antebellum South had accepted that blacks have been through slavery, they are going through it now, and blacks will continue to suffer through slavery in the future. Maybe someday slavery will be made illegal, but the discrimination and racism towards African Americans will still be there. One way the audience sees this is because if their enjoyment going to the Great Farm House, a place that resembled a small village. When going to the farm house they were "particularly enthusiastic" (chapter 2). To them, this was the time for getting away from plantation as a mini "escape”; however, they were just sent there for specific tasks and jobs, not at a reward of some type. This just shows how Africans American have accepted their role in society as slaves. Blacks were kept from the one thing that they needed to escape. Education. Since they weren't allowed to see anything beyond the confinement of slavery, they never understood that education was the key to the end of slavery. ...