What has slavery taught us about human behavior?

            Slavery was a coercive system that caused the death of millions of Africans, and it has taught us a lot about human behavior. We have seen the obvious, how the creation of wealth created more and more greed among Americans, which caused them to work their slaves worse than animals. I do not understand how someone could work another person to death, or beat them for any reason at all, much less for not making a quota that is unrealistic to make each day. How did the slave-owners manage what had to be the cognitive dissonance that must have erupted from loving one’s own children and family, yet acting in the cruelest, most inhuman way possible when hurting and separating someone else’s family? Was there any remorse? The only answer I can come up with to partly explain this twisting of human nature is that money took control over the slave owners’ senses. Greed had to have been the driving force.

In Soul by Soul, we saw how Americans used slavery as a means of climbing up the social ladder. It created an ethical trap that the whites never saw coming. It seems that whites only saw the social “benefits” to owning slaves that allowed them to transform themselves; women could work in the kitchen instead of the fields alongside their husbands, and men did not have to work as hard and could use the money generated to upgrade their lifestyle. They did not see the moral degradation to their souls that was occurring. In a sense, slavery was the bifurcation of the notion of woman versus womanhood, man versus manhood. As a result of that bifurcation, people lost their humanity and became nothing more than the animals they were. I find this interesting, especially since we never really hear about how slavery transformed and negatively impacted the Colonists lives; to me it seems that slave owners thought they needed slavery to achieve a better lifestyle, when in reality slavery robbed them of their humanity.

            At the level of basic humanity, slavery had the opposite effect on Africans. Their plight brought forth in them a strength that comes when humans are forced to “make the best of a bad situation.” Throughout the years of slavery, we saw how Africans continued to stay strong and fight for their rights in the face of impossible odds, regardless of the horrific punishments that they experienced. In class we discussed how slave women would go the extreme of even killing their own children to keep them from lives as slaves. It is disturbing to me that those enslaved would think that death is a better option than being a slave, but this tells me that I am utterly unable to comprehend the extreme brutality of slavery. I think that slaves called upon incredible inner strength by continuing to rise up against slavery. Most found a reason to keep on living from day to day, and that reason was the hope of someday being free. Africans like Fredrick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, and Nat Turner were all slaves that stood up against the institution in attempt to gain their freedom. The Colonists may have had the power to enforce laws against Africans, but slaves were still able to engage their free will to fight against being totally dominated and dehumanized. The weight of slavery on society as a whole crushed the soul of the United States for quite a long time, and the stain remains with us until today.