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Fredrick Douglas

In: People

Submitted By jgeorge
Words 551
Pages 3
Jason Dean
Dr. Thomas Lyons
English 3360
September 1, 2011
Fredrick Douglass Journal In his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, an American Slave, Douglass invites his audience to view slavery from the inside out. The obvious irony is that the vast majority of his audience, initially, was of the same race as the villains depicted inside his book. Douglass used his experiences both as a spectator and participant in slavery to highlight and challenge the hypocrisies in society he found that were born, bred and sanctioned by the institution of slavery; one in particular was the interpretation and uses of Christianity by slave owners as means of empowering slavery instead of empowering the slaves. From the implied validation of slavery via the Curse of Ham to the deplorable acts inflicted on slaves by men viewed reverently as men of God within their communities, Christianity, a religion embedded with the teaching on the tentacles of peace, miracles and love served largely as a banner of confusion to a group of people whose need of those tentacles stood second to none. The curse of Ham is a biblical reference to the Book of Genesis 9:20-27 where the story is told of Ham having a curse placed upon his son after Ham’s father Noah, after Ham saw his father nude. Black Africans were viewed by many as descendants of Ham, which in the minds of some white Christians at the time validated slavery. Douglass disarms the Ham argument early in the book when he pens “If the lineal descendants of Ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved, it is certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who, like myself, owe their existence to white fathers, and those fathers most frequently their own masters.” In essence, Some of the same men that fathered a slave, beat that slave of his own

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