Tahir, Beast Nature

The objective of the institution of slavery is to dehumanize the slave by subjecting him/her to all sorts of horrible degradations, and justifying those actions by the claim that these slaves are not human. But slavery does not simply dehumanize the slave; the perpetrator of these gruesome crimes loses his humanity in the process, thus becoming just as dehumanized as the slaves who are the victims of his cruelty. In fact, one could argue that the slaves aren’t the sub-humans; in reality, it is the slave-owners who aren’t fully human since no man with any vestige of humanity would so eagerly attempt to destroy another’s with a viciousness that borders on religious fervor.
In “Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass,” the author talks about the first time he witnesses a slave getting beat by her master. The slave-owner tied the poor woman by her hands from a hook, which she dangled helplessly from as if she were a piece of meat, and then proceeded to beat her with such force and violence that her blood fell in torrents to the floor. The slave-owner was attempting to teach her a lesson: the lesson that she should never disobey his commands. To him, the woman is nothing more than an animal, to be treated as he deems fit. For someone to treat another human being in such a manner makes them less than human. If someone believes that he is superior to another human and as such can inflict agonizing tortures on the “lesser” person, than that person loses any shred of humanity he previously held.
Another example is shown in “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” At a part in this work, Jacobs speaks of how sad it is to be a slave girl. Not only are they subjected to the same degradations the male slaves suffer, but they have an added injury: the almost certain threat of rape. “…there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death; all these are inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men.” If any person believes rape to be condonable through the guise of slavery, that person is an abomination and definitely dehumanized. This is one of the most hideous blights on man’s nature; to participate in rape makes him equal to a beast.
To be a slave-owner, one must turn a blind eye (and heart) to his morals. By attempting to dehumanize another person, the slave-owner can pretend that his actions are legitimate since the slave isn’t a real person, and that he still retains traces of morality. In doing so, he has lied to himself, for he is the one who surely has become something less than human. Do we have anything that can parallel this in our present day? Perhaps our treatment of illegal immigrants is similar. They are subjected to many things that a normal citizen would never have to deal with it. True, they are illegal, but does that mean they can be treated so unfairly? We all are guaranteed basic rights as fellow humans; to deny them to anyone simply because of their "status" as a non-citizen is akin to a folly that we have already committed in the past.