Slave Narratives - Master-Slave Relationships
From these excerpts I learned a lot about the everyday hardships that slaves must face. Both the slaves and masters faced a "dehumanizing effect" that seemed to grow each day that the idea of absolute power was presented. The slaves faced raw abuse from the masters including being treated as animals and essentially having their whole lives snatched away from them. The worst hardship that a slave could endure would be unconsenting sexual abuse from their masters. This could sometimes lead to the forced birth of new slaves for the slave owners own malevolent tasks. The masters also faced a "dehumanizing effect" with the absolute power that they had over these humans. The slave owners forced many of their slaves to work and abused them on every level afterwards. The slave masters seemed to become more ruthless and unforgiving with the more power that they held. The masters treated their slaves as property and even took away the basic human rights that the slaves had been born with.
Why did slave owners feel the need to treat their slaves at such a savage and barbaric level to be able to maintain control over them?
What are some of the ways that these slaves were able to cope with and accept the fact that these ruthless crimes were being committed against them?
How were slave owners able to come to terms with the fact that they were treating human beings this poorly every day of their life?
No comments:
Post a Comment