Frederick Douglass And The Power Of Education

In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Between the World and Me, the authors, Frederick Douglass and Ta- Nehisi Coates, develop the idea of the constant presence of racism and how our society can overcome it with the power of education. Douglass believed that education and self-improvement were incredibly important. The worst thing about slavery, in his mind, is that it prevents self-improvement through education. He works towards becoming free by expanding his knowledge through reading. He still has to physically escape, but it's his education that gives him the strength to make it happen.
Douglass shows how white slaveholders kept their slaves ignorant. At this time, many people believed that slavery was natural. They believed

that blacks were incapable of participating in society and should be kept as workers for whites. Slave owners keeping slaves ignorant of basic facts about themselves, such as their birth date, robbed children of their true identity. As slave children grow older, slave owners prevent them from learning simple things, such as how to read and write, because they believed that literacy would give them a sense of self‑sufficiency. Slaveholders understood that literacy would lead slaves to question the right of whites to keep slaves. Finally, by keeping slaves illiterate, Southern slaveholders maintained control over what the rest of America knows about slavery. If slaves cannot write, their side of the slavery story cannot be told.
Coates's initially learned how the world works by spending time in the streets, especially as he branded the Baltimore schools as useless in reducing the distance between the world and himself. When he attends Howard he is more open to education but also embraces how he is self- taught. He learns not just the history of black people in America, but also how to think, how to love and feel in different ways, how to answer that essential question of what exactly is between the world and himself.
The most obvious theme of Coates’ work, is the racial divide that exists in America. From early American history when blacks were enslaved to the present day in which “black bodies” are under constantly watched and threatened, white society has consistently failed to acknowledge the humanity of blacks in order to maintain its "Dream." Coates constantly brings up the idea that “racism gave birth to race, not the other way around.” White people are not actually white but rather they think they are white because it gives them power and privilege. They claim the variations of wealth, education, and treatment by the police as differences that are just natural forces.
Douglass has no doubt that knowledge automatically renders slaves free. Knowledge helps slaves to understand the injustice of slavery and helps them recognize themselves as men rather than slaves. Rather than provide immediate freedom, this awakened consciousness brings suffering, as Hugh Auld predicts. Once slaves are able to articulate the injustice of slavery, they come to loathe their masters, but still cannot physically escape without meeting great danger. He became fully aware of the reality of slavery; he wrote "[Literacy] had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out. In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity" (36).