Slavery Then and Now

Both texts we've read for this week present clear pictures of not only the horrific consequences of slavery on blacks, but also slavery's corrupting powers for those who impose it. Frederick Douglass recounts tale after tale of white foremen and masters cruelly beating black slaves: he implies that enforcing such an unnatural system--the enslavement of one human being by another--forces those doing the enslaving to partake in inhuman behavior. In other words, the system of slavery is so inherently wrong, it requires extreme callousness and brutality of the white men for them to participate in it.

Harriet Jacobs echoes this cycle of moral degradation in her writings, as she relates the sexual harassment she was subject to under white male masters. Her audience of white Christian women would have read her story as proof that female slaves provided readily-available temptation for white men, and thus slavery is immoral. If men could not be masters over women slaves, they would not be tempted to engage in illicit relations with them. If Dr. Flint had not pursued her so aggressively, she would not have had to lose her children as she did.

Not to be too controversial, but I think the free market as it stands today in America is a form of enslavement. A society based on competition rather than cooperation will inevitably marginalize certain groups of people. The US economy is based on the myth of the "self-made man," which we discussed earlier in Benjamin Franklin's writings. Someone can, indeed, put in a great deal of effort and work into building a livelihood, but a competition-based market ensures that for every one person that does succeed, at least a hundred others will not--no matter how hard they work.