Monday, September 9, 2013

Slavery--Sifting through the grey areas

Every slave experience is different, and the institution of slavery is troubling enough that it seems unfair to generalize about it.  However, we will have to write about the conditions of slavery going forward, so we need to figure out some way to compartmentalize the experience.  

What are the conditions that shape the slave experience?  How does gender, location, and age play in?  What role does the master play in this process?

There is no right or wrong answer here, but what would be helpful would be examples from at least two of the readings to get a better sense of perspective.

10 comments:

  1. For sure, all slaves had different experiences.each one depended on the age, location, and the master.Some experiences were terrible and the opposite. This was mostly based on who the master was. I believed back then the master dictated how the slaves life was. Not all masters were mean and terrible people. There were some that were very nice and treated there slaves like equal. But on the other hand there were those masters that would work there slaves to death. These masters made the lives of the slaves bad. Beating them and starving them made the slaves cry themselves to sleep every night. Which really gets me thinking, how can someone do this torture some one so bad and make them beg for mercy. The master really determined how the slave lived. But the slave would also have to contribute around the house. doing all the chores.

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  2. The degrading and demoralizing factors in slavery are completely outrageous, first of all no matter where they were slaves tended to be treated terribly. They were constantly physically and mentally abused. There is a constant fear in displeasing their masters. However, treatment varied depending on all the factors such as gender, location and age. For example if you were a woman you were likley to be raped as described in, "A slave girls tells of her life", if you were a man you were expected to do heavy work in the cotton fields as showed in tonight's reading. The worst part of slavery was the amount of abuse that went on even if the slave did nothing wrong. For example in, "This Cargo of Human Flesh" a man was whiped for no other reason than pure unadulturated hate. He had done nothing to displease his master yet he was whiped and beaten to the point near death. It is through reading like these that I truly question these slave owners humanity, what could have caused such a lack of humanity between fellow human being? It was not enough to have them as slaves but they felt pleasure in causeing them pain, in being superior and stripping them of everything they held dear and close to their heart. For example in one of our previous passages we learn about how Harriett is constantly threatened that is she does not sub come to her masters sick twisted sexual abuses that he will take away her family, the only thing that she has. The slaver owners were truly not okay in the head, they completely stripped these human being of everything that they had to the point where even they considered themselves unworthy and less than the white man. The part that most impacted me about tonight's reading was not only the grotesque descriptions of the heartless beatings but what the slave himself said, "I was heart sick at seeing my fellow CREATURES (not humans) bought and sold." This shows how truly manipulated and dehumanized the slaves truly were.

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  3. There are many conditions that effect "the slave experience." What i have gathered swo far is that there are many things that go into how you're treated as a slave. The farther up north you are, the more likely it is that you will be treated better than a slave who is down south. Gender also plays a role because the men are expected to work in the fields and be harder workers, while women can still work in the field but they also work in the houses. Being a women can also make everything worse because of the sexual torment from some of the masters, and then jealousy of the masters wife. If a slave is under a certain age they get to stay with their mother for a little until they are sold and separated from the rest of their family. The older the slave, the more likely it is that they will be whipped because they're now in the fields and expected to do more and know more.

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  4. Gender, location, and age played a large role in how a slave was treated. There were more known occurances of female slaves being raped and illegitimate children between a female slave and white male master being born than male slaves being raped. At that time, women weren't equal to men, so if a white mistress slept with a slave, or gave birth to a slave's child, it would've been much more looked down upon than if a white master did it. As for location, black slaves were treated better in the north than in the south, due to the north's evolving views on slavery. Location also changed the jobs a slave might have to do, and the people they'd have to work with. If a slave was moved to a high class city and worked in a restaurant, he might be treated a bit better than if he was in a cotton field or rice paddy in the south. The slave who worked in a restaurant would be exposed to food, drinking, (possibly gambling), galas and dance events, and wouldn't have to do as strenuous labor as the slaves doing hard manual labor in the southern fields. The restaurant slave might be provided with suitable clothes to wear around customers, and not be as severely starved or punished as badly as those in the south, who were treated like workhorses; they were whipped, fed unwanted parts of foods, and provided with little to no clothing. Younger slaves would be given different jobs than older slaves, and would be less susceptible to getting raped by their masters. They may even be allowed to play with the master's children. Younger slaves would be given jobs for small and nimble bodies, and older slaves would be given jobs with heavier labor aspects, or could be assigned to be the slave driver, who would punish the other slaves under the master's command. Of course, all of these variables (gender, location, and age) and how they changed the experience of a slave all depended on their master's decisions. The master owned the slave; the slave had no rights, and was treated just like a tool. The master gave all the commands to the slaves, and they were expected to obey without question. All of the possibilities of the varying conditions that a slave might be in could be completely controlled by the master, and may not follow any of the ideas that I formerly mentioned. The master had the ultimate controls and decided a slave's fate.

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  5. Several factors such as gender, location, and age shape the slave experience. If the slave was male, he was treated more brutally in the physical sense. Usually, they would be whipped more or punished more harshly. If the slave was a female, there was a big chance that she was treated badly in the sexual sense. As seen in "A Slave Girl Tells of Her Life," even at a young age she was raped and sexually abused by her master. In addition to being raped, there were many accounts of illegitimate children. Location was also an important factor. The further the slaves were in the South, or further "down the river," the worse the slaves were treated. In the North, the people's view on slavery was changing and they were against it. Lastly, age played a major role in shaping a slave's experience. At young or elderly ages, slaves were not worked as hard. However, if the slave was at the height of their fitness and around their middle ages, they were given more work and probably treated much worse. Gender, location, and age definitely shaped a slave's experience.

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  6. All of the passages that we have read shared a few main themes. One similarity is that not a single slave owner was kind because as it said in tonight's reading, there cannot be a good slave owner because the act of owning another human being is in itself a violent action. Another sad theme was that whether the slave was a man, woman, from the North or the South, he or she would be faced with a difficult decision. To maintain their honor, dignity, and higher moral standards than their white counterparts and to be punished, or to become corrupted and live with guilt for the rest of their bleak lives. For example, in many of stories of female slaves, the owners would force them to either be raped, or to lose their children or even be sent to an even worse plantation. Either outcome was equally horrible so it wasn't really a choice. This was probably one of the worst aspects of slavery; the masters would not only enslave the body and the mind, but also the soul. Except for the female slaves who were treated even worse, most of the conditions for slaves were equally horrendous.

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  7. The goal of trying to live your life as peacefully and painlessly as possible is the conditions slaves lived in. As seen in the reading this cruel, ignorant, feeble people looked for any reason to assault and harass the very people who were making their lives possible. The conditions are unbearable where you feed enough to stay alive and work while being woken up at 4:30 to nothing but hard labor until nighttime. The condition is hopeless were if a mud splatter falls on someone they will spend the three days searching for you trying to make your already awful life worse. The slave masters could care less about the slave as long as he works and suffers. Only an insecure, destructive and truly evil culture could perform acts such as these.

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  9. Regardless of circumstance, slaves were treated poorly no matter what. Of course, age, gender and location did effect the degree of treatment, the master was a much larger component. The age of the slaves could have dictated what kind of labor they were made to do and for how long. The gender has a lot to do with labor as well as the men were usually given the more strenuous labor. Gender also dictated whether the slave would have been vulnerable to sexual abuse. Location being a large component as well, as the more north the state the less harsh the conditions were climatically as well as treatment. The master was the biggest part in how slaves were kept because they were the ones in charge. The master could and would dictate the punishment of a slave and make most of he decisions regarding them

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  10. The experience of being a slave relies on so many different factors that every was so unique. There are the terrible ones we hear of, which we think was more common, but we also forget those who were almost considered as part of the family. Although this doesn't justify the practice of slavey it puts it into perspective. There are two main factors that determine the experience a slave will most likely have: the disposition of the master and birth given qualities of the slave. Probably the most significant determinate would be the gender of said slave. It was more likely that women would get house duties which do not take as much toll on them as field work. There's also the point that if one has a woman slave it's pretty much securing slaves for the family for future generations because she can have kids rather than each generation buying new ones. But then there's also the added vulnerability of a woman slave. She's more vulnerable to sexual and physical abuse whereas whipping and more physical consequences were given.

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