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Slavery - The Destruction of Humanity

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Humanity is the ability to recognize and respect the rights of each human being. There are three points of view which we have to take in consideration to see if slavery robs people from their humanity and this are the slave, the master, and the abolitionist. The slaves humanity is almost completely lost because their rights and elements of life have been taken away by their slave masters. They have to change the way they are in order to survive and they are not equal to every other white human being. The slave masters humanity is completely lost because of the way they take away their slaves human elements and values. They take advantage and exploit human beings disrespecting their rights and freedom. The abolitionist humanity is not lost because they gain humanity by protecting the rights of the slaves and by trying to free them from slavery. DIfferent primary source documents prove my point of view in this issue. Slaves are robbed from their humanity because they are treated inferior to other human beings. As we can see in the slave narrative of Henry Bibb, slaves were limited to see their family members. They were punished unreasonably and their only way of changing this was if they ran away. We can also see in Frederick Douglass’s document that slaves were not able to learn how to read or write making their education inferior. He also says that after he got his liberty there were no slaveholders to make him feel as if he wasn't a human being. We can see that slaves were completely destroyed and exploited. There were times when they preferred to die than keep on suffering. According to Wikipedia, the weighted average of a slave price was calculated to be about $340. No human being should have a price tag. This demonstrates that they were treated as object and property instead of humans. This simply discriminates them and takes away a big part of their humanity. In Frederick Douglass’s narrative we see that he was constantly whipped and that he worked for many hours until his body could do no more. He worked from the moment the light shined until the sun disappeared. They were not paid a cent and whatever they earned had to go to their mast

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