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Essay / Dehumanizing practices in the story of the life of...
It was at this time that Fredrick did not even know his age. As mentioned in the memoir of Fredrick Douglass, Account of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, Douglass states "to my knowledge it is the wish of most masters to keep their slave as ignorant" (Douglass, 15). This is the first scenario in which we see the dehumanizing practices of slavery occurring. During Fredrick's childhood, he noticed that white children could tell their ages, and he himself was unable to do so. He could not speak to his master because slaves did not have this right. The fact that a slave owner kept his slave in ignorance shows an example of how slaves were dehumanized. They were deprived of knowledge of themselves as people because they were designed to be the property of their owners. The fact that he could not have information and knowledge about simple things made him unhappy and led him to believe that the process of dehumanization occurs when the slave owner tries to keep the slave in the ignorance. It was a shocking thing for Fredrick to hear about the nature of slavery, but it helped him establish a stronger mindset for