How Is Frederick Douglass Ignorant

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In Frederick Douglass’s book, A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, he demonstrates how slaves are treated poorly and making them feel ignorant so they don’t have a sense of identity and a sense of who they are, and how he teaches himself how to be his own and how he later expresses himself with personality. Since Douglass was born, he was given no information about himself. When he grew up, however, he had no “accurate knowledge of my age” because the slave owners keep their slaves ignorant and are given no form of knowledge (17). It is the slave owners “wish of most masters” to make sure their slaves are “ignorant” (17). This means that they don’t let them learn anything. Slave owners keep slaves from learning about their past, …show more content…
While being free, he reflects on things that freedom offers him that slavery did not offer him while he was a slave. After being free, Douglass now after “the fight with Mr.Covey” that when he would fight he would have “succeeded very well” (84). Now that Douglass has a sense of himself and who he is, something that slave owners told him he couldn’t have. He now is not afraid to stand up for himself. Once Douglass is a free man, he starts earning “one dollar and fifty cents per day” and when he finishes work he feels he “earned it” which makes him feel like he can do things on his own and he feels independent (86). Like he is his own person and not working for someone. Douglass after a while of being free he “found employment” and this would be the first work he would have done “entirely on his own” (98). This directly challenges the idea of slaveholders not wanting slaves to be themselves and having Douglass live on his own and make his own money throws that off track. Douglass feels that when he is given the right to “bear the responsibility of a freeman” (90). Douglass can now feel like himself, something that the slaveowners did not believe, and that he now feels like a free

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