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Political philosopher and social theorist Thomas Sowell has once said, “It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” It is inevitable to meet an ignorant person around each corner that one turns. It is up to the victim to either let the ignorant person corrupt him or to let the victim become smarter. One of America’s greatest activists, Martin Luther King, believed that “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” With this in mind, “The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all” (Kennedy).
In the novel, Kindred, written by Octavia E. Butler, many characters throughout the book displays ignorance versus knowledge which, like MLK has said, is dangerous. The main character, Dana, time travels from 1976 back to the early nineteenth century. When she time travels, she pops in and out of places at random times; most of the time, it happens when people are around. In this novel, many different characters show their ignorance by displaying their emotions as if they did not see anything happen at all. This act can be easily associated with society today. Hypothetically, if a person sees a ghost, they tell themselves that it would never happen again, and this, most of the time, is not the case. Therefore, it is a fact that ignorance and knowledge will always be a problem that society will have due to people’s refusal to accept what they see happen right in front of them.
There are many things that can happen when something unbelievable happens. Each person reacts differently to the unusual phenomenon. One way that a person reacts when encountered with an unusual event is by ignoring it. In the second chapter of the novel, Margare...
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...sked, “‘Well … it happened once. What if it happens again?’ ‘No. No, I don’t think …’” (17). In this case, Kevin displays even more ignorance by displaying his rational knowledge.
Ignorance played a big role throughout the book. It was believed that it was better for a slave to have ignorance than knowledge because with ignorance, the slaves have no reasons to leave. However, with knowledge, the slaves would be able to write their own passes. In addition, they would try to escape because they know they could do better. “It was dangerous to educate slaves, they warned. Education made blacks dissatisfied with slavery. It spoiled them for field work” (236). Leaving a black person ignorant of education and such will prevent slaves from developing self-worth and wanting to leave for a better life. For this reason, leaving the slave ignorant is what many slaveholders do.
After a basketball game, four kids, Andrew Jackson, Tyrone Mills, Robert Washington and B.J. Carson, celebrate a win by going out drinking and driving. Andrew lost control of his car and crashed into a retaining wall on I-75. Andy, Tyrone, and B.J. escaped from the four-door Chevy right after the accident. Teen basketball star and Hazelwood high team captain was sitting in the passenger's side with his feet on the dashboard. When the crash happened, his feet went through the windshield and he was unable to escape. The gas tank then exploded and burned Robbie to death while the three unharmed kids tried to save him.
Slave owners dehumanized slaves in several ways. For example, Masters would cut slaves hair, severely beat slaves, and give them new names to replace their African names; in efforts to cleanse the slaves of their African roots and their Masters did these things to constantly remind the slaves that they are not people but, property and that they have no control of their lives. Another example of dehumanization is the slave owners/masters not teaching or wanting the slaves to read. In the book When I was a slave: Memoirs from the slave narrative collection, Boston Blackwell emphasizes the lack of education of the average poor slave, and why the typical master would never want a slave to learn how to read and be educated. Blackwell states: “Us poor niggers never allowed to learn anything. All the readin’ they ever hear was when they was carried through the big Bible. The massa say that keep the slaves in the places” (Yetman, 2002 p.16). The desire of the whites to keep slaves uneducated is a form of dehumanization, because whites did not consider slaves as people and they did not consider them as civilized members of their society; therefore, they did not see the purpose of educating slaves. Also, if the slaves became educated the whites feared that they would be better equipped to resist slavery. Overall, the dehumanization of a slave is an example of psychological/emotional trauma because when whites
“Illiterate citizens seldom vote. Those who do are forced to cast a vote of questionable worth. They cannot make informed decisions based on serious print information. More frequently, they vote for a face, a smile, or a style, not for a mind or character or body of beliefs. Sometimes the can be alerted to their interests by aggressive voter education
I know this because in the first paragraph of, “ History is a Weapon,” which states, “ Whereas the teaching of slaves to read and write, has a tendency to excrite dissatisfaction in their minds, and to produce insurrection and rebellion, to manifest injury of the citizens of this state.” what I feel the author was trying to say is that if they were smart enough to read and write, then they had the intelligence to rebel upon the owners, and they could find ways to reverse what was done to them. Education is a dangerous weapon, and it pays to be
Depending on the slave owner’s rules, many slaves were denied any type of freedom. This even included the right of the slaves to learn to read and write. Many slave owners would deny their slaves these rights in order to make sure that they did not develop desires that could lead to an escape or rebellion. Most slaveholders were very afraid when it came to the thought of a rebellion because the slaves were very important to their economy and their families’ wellbeing. Many of them attempted to reduce the risk of rebellion by reducing the amount of exposure of their slaves to the world outside their plantations. By keeping their slaves from exposure to the outside world, they could eliminate many of the possible dreams and/or desires that might come from the knowledge of the world outside the slave owners plantation or farm.
Slaves remaining ignorant is all a part of the slave master's plan to keep slaves lower in society, essentially making them obedient and submissive.
Slave owners not only broke slave families up, but they also tried to keep all the slaves illiterate. In the book slave owners thought, "A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master-to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. If you teach a slave how to read, they would become unmangeable and have no value to his master." Masters thought that if a slave became literate then they would rebel and get other slaves to follow them. Also masters lied to slaves saying learning would do them no good, only harm them. They tried using that reverse psychology to make it seem like what they were doing was right.
Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred is categorized as science fiction because of the existence of time travel. However, the novel does not center on the schematics of this type of journey. Instead, the novel deals with the relationships forged between a Los Angeles woman from the 20th century, and slaves from the 19th century. Therefore, the mechanism of time travel allows the author a sort of freedom when writing this "slavery narrative" apart from her counterparts. Butler is able to judge the slavery from the point of view of a truly "free" black woman, as opposed to an enslaved one describing memories.
Slave owners in the South were some of the most cruel and inhumane human beings out there. They used many tactics to maintain a prosperous system of slavery amongst them. Like many, Frederick Douglass was born a slave. Deprived of as much as possible, Douglass knew not much more than his place of birth. Masters were encouraged to dispossess slaves of any knowledge and several of them did not know their birthdays or other personal details of themselves. The purpose of this was to keep slaves as misinformed of anything other than labor as possible. Slave owners knew the dangers that would upraise if slaves became literate and brave enough to fight for freedom.
I am responding to Micheal Schudson’s essay titled “America’s Ignorant Voter”. He makes several arguments against whether America having relatively ignorant voters poses a problem to our society, and whether it’s becoming worse over the years. One of the arguments he poses as to why Americans seem so clueless about political matters is due to the complexities of our nation’s political institutions.
Their education had given them a new perspective of everything around them—a glimpse to a whole new world. Upon learning to read, Douglass began to realize how an education could ruin slaves. With education, comes enlightenment, and for him his enlightenment was the realization to the injustices going on around him. With him finally being able to read, he understood more fully the implications of slavery sometimes served to make him more miserable as he came to comprehend the hopelessness of the situation for himself and the other slaves. He states in his narrative, “In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me” (268) because he realized that his knowledge came at a cost—he knew that there was nothing normal and right about slavery, yet he had to live as one—whatever knowledge he had attained, festered in his mind and made him even unhappier with the conditions and treatment than
When defining the word blindness, it can be interpreted in various ways. Either it can be explained as sightless, or it can be carefully deciphered as having a more complex in-depth analysis. In the novel Blindness, Jose Saramago depicts and demonstrates how in an instant your right to see can be taken in an instant. However, in this novel, blindness is metaphorically related to ‘seeing’ the truth beyond our own bias opinions.
Slaves were subject to harsh working conditions, malicious owners, and illegal matters including rape and murder. In many instances, slaves were born into slavery, raised their families in slavery, and died within the captivity of that same slavery. These individuals were not allowed to learn how to read, write, and therefore think for themselves. This is where the true irony begins to come into light. While we have been told our entire lives that education and knowledge is the greatest power available to everyone under the sun, there was a point in time where this concept was used to keep certain people under others. By not allowing the slaves to learn how to read, then they were inevitably not allowing the slaves to form free thoughts. One of my favorite quotes is that of Haruki Murakami, “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, then you can only think what everyone else is thing.” This applied in magnitudes to those who didn’t get to read at all. Not only were these individuals subject to the inability to think outside the box, but for most of these their boxes were based upon the information the slaves owners allowed them to
Douglass was motivated to learn how to read by hearing his master condemn the education of slaves. Mr. Auld declared that an education would “spoil” him and “forever unfit him to be a slave” (2054). He believed that the ability to read makes a slave “unmanageable” and “discontented” (2054). Douglass discovered that the “white man’s power to enslave the black man” (2054) was in his literacy and education. As long as the slaves are ignorant, they would be resigned to their fate. However, if the slaves are educated, they would understand that they are as fully human as the white men and realize the unfairness of their treatment. Education is like a forbidden fruit to the slave; therefore, the slave owners guard against this knowledge of good and evil. Nevertheless, D...
Douglass views his education as his most important feature, but he also enables his brain to the realizing of the torture upon his fellow slaves. Douglass was not allowed to learn, because he was a slave, and they didn’t want slaves to become smarter than the whites. In the passage it states, “learning would ...