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Despite the pains taken to eliminate discrimination, no one can deny that racism continues to exist today. However, we must question ourselves, “why does it still exist?” With the abolition of slavery, the physical shackles were unchained, but the mental stigma of a lower sub-race remained. Through Frederick Douglass’ account of life as a slave, we can begin to understand the psychological foundation of racism as we experience it today.
Douglass moved to Baltimore to live with Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Auld. Sophia Auld, not accustomed to being a slave owner, began to teach Douglass how to read. Upon finding out, her husband forbade his wife from continuing with lessons, explaining, “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell…Learning will spoil the best nigger in the world…Now, if you teach that nigger how to read, there will be no keeping him” (47). In Auld’s reasoning, if he stops Douglass from learning, he stops Douglass from being human. Auld desires for Douglass to be as simple-minded as possible, making him into some sort of incomplete pseudo-human.
I believe that through these actions, as a white slave owner, Auld justifies the actions that he and other slave owners took part in. If a dog isn’t human, don’t treat it like one. If a slave isn’t human, why treat him like one? Letting Douglass learn to read would have humanized him, taking him one step up and one step closer to a white man. Slavery was much more than involuntary servitude. It was a state of mind that involved a conscious decision to deny a man of his rights. It is mentally much easier to be a slave owner when you don’t have the guilt of mistreating an equal human being hanging over your head.
After Sophia Auld’s change of heart, Douglass notes, “In entering upon the duties of a slaveholder, she did not seem to perceive that I sustained to her the relation of a mere chattel, and that for her to treat me as a human being was not only wrong, but dangerously so” (50). Sophia, who had never held slaves before, can be assumed to have been an innocent. Prior to her husband’s reprimands, she found nothing wrong with teaching Douglass how to read. It did not occur to her that she was to treat Douglass as property. To Sophia, he was simply a child that desired to learn. However, Douglass continues, “slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me” (50). Becoming a “correct” slave owner had a negative effect on Sophia. From naturally being kind to her fellow human, she eventually became “even more violent in her opposition than that her husband herself” (51). We can see that the act of holding slaves is not innate; forcing blacks into involuntary servitude and preventing them from becoming human was indeed a learned process.
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These sordid notions have become deep-set into the minds of people even in the present. We are able to see remnants of such a manner in some thinking today. Racism is tolerated and still apparent in modern times because of the view that blacks are not people. “Of course black people are people,” one may scoff. However, in the back of one’s mind, can we ever be totally confident that we believe that they are exactly the same as us? Do we really believe that black people are exactly the same as white people? The fragment of doubt makes it that much easier to tell that racist joke or think that racist thought. The perception that “we are better than you” is what allows racism to persist. In a natural world of the early Sophia Aulds, where color does not make a difference, racism might not exist. However, our minds today are tainted with ideas of human superiority based on color. The mental aspects of slavery were critical to maintaining the institution in the past. Its subsequent remnants are the reason why racism continues to exist.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. New York Penguin Group. 17.
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