Ignorance: Most Preferred Tool by Slave Owners to Perpetuate Slavery (Book Report Sample)

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Ignorance as the Most Preferred Tool by Slave Owners to Perpetuate Slavery
The Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass is a compelling story about the challenges African Americans encountered as slaves. Narrated by Fredrick Douglass himself, it provides a detailed first-hand account about the experiences of Black slaves at the hands of White plantation owners in the South. Slaves were forced to endure brutality, pain, humiliation, starvation, and a crouching servility to their masters. Douglass makes several arguments about how slaves were easily subdued by their masters, despite their sheer strength in numbers. One of the arguments he proposes is that slave owners used ignorance to keep slaves in a perpetual state of mental darkness. They understood that slaves could only be kept on a leash if their minds were deprived of intellectual enlightenment. Ignorance facilitated slavery by taking away slaves’ identity, keeping them uninformed about current affairs, denying them religious emancipation, and allowing slave owners to divide and conquer them.
The Tool of Ignorance
Slave owners forbade their slaves from attaining any form of education. They believed education would make slaves discontented and unmanageable. Douglass (pg.23) postulates that White slave owners argued that “learning would spoil the best [slave] in the world”, making him/her “unmanageable, and of no value to his master.” Consequently, masters frustrated all concerted efforts by slaves to attain any form of literacy. For instance, many slave owners used whips to dissuade slaves from learning. According to Douglass (pg.46), “[e]very moment slaves spent in that school, they were liable to be taken up, and given thirty-nine lashes.” It was also a serious offense for masters to teach their slaves how to read and write. Douglass (pg.23) notes that “it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read.” Therefore, it was in their best interest to keep slaves uneducated to avoid the repercussions both from the law and their fellow slave owners.
Reasons Ignorance was Tolerated by Slave Owners
First, ignorance took away the slaves’ identity. An identity is important as it gives people a sense of pride, knowing who they are and where they came from. This helps strengthen their character, making them stronger individuals. Slaves did not have an identity apart from who owned them and