I selected the song “Slavery Chain” because the song was very moving in that there was a deeper meaning or story in the song about how the slaves were shackled to their masters. As a matter of fact, When I read the lyrics of the song, I could feel the echoes of past slaves singing this song and the feelings that they felt. The lyrics “Slavery Chain done broke at last” shows how eager they are to be released from their slave masters, I also think that this suggests at how they were shackled to their slave masters and also implies that that have been waiting a long time for the “slavery chain” to be broken. In fact, I can almost hear them crying out loud about how much they wanted to be free. Furthermore, I was curious about the name of the song, “Slavery Chain” and found out that slave chain gangs or the chaining of slaves together to prevent escape or as a punishment was a relatively common occurrence, this once again shows just what the slaves had to endure, if I were in their position, I would want to be released as well. …show more content…
I think that they saw God as something that they dedicated their lives to and saw him as a symbol of hope. In fact, because of the “till I die” part of the phrase, I researched how the slaves were treated and found out that they were often whipped and physically abused, perhaps they were trying to say that no matter what they had to suffer or endure, they would still believe in God until the end. Additionally, the lyrics “You’re chillun and you shall be free” once again communicates their stubbornness to change their attitude. I think that the slave masters saw this as a problem and tried to deter them from believing in God by whipping and physically abusing
Douglass continues to describe the severity of the manipulation of Christianity. Slave owners use generations of slavery and mental control to convert slaves to the belief God sanctions and supports slavery. They teach that, “ man may properly be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained by God” (Douglass 13). In order to justify their own wrongdoings, slaveowners convert the slaves themselves to Christianity, either by force or gentle coercion over generations. The slaves are therefore under the impression that slavery is a necessary evil. With no other source of information other than their slave owners, and no other supernatural explanation for the horrors they face other than the ones provided by Christianity, generations of slaves cannot escape from under the canopy of Christianity. Christianity molded so deeply to the ideals of slavery that it becomes a postmark of America and a shield of steel for American slave owners. Douglass exposes the blatant misuse of the religion. By using Christianity as a vessel of exploitation, they forever modify the connotations of Christianity to that of tyrannical rule and
What is presented to the slaves as a religious tenet is merely propaganda used to quell rebellious behavior. They fear a society in which they no longer serve to benefit from slave labor, and so they fear rebellion, they fear objection, they fear events like the Nat Turner Insurrection. The system the slaveholders strive so ardently to protect begins to affect even them, those in power, negatively. They begin to cope with their fear the only way they know how, by projecting it upon the slaves.
We typically think of slaves as a mistreated African American. Thats not all they were, they sang, they read, they were a huge part of our history we don't even acknowledge. They contributed a lot to our music, you could say they were the roots of jazz and blues. Slaves sang almost every moment of their life, there is many different categories of their music, but one of the most interesting is field hollers. Field hollers contain a lot of information on the slave(s). This means emotion is strong in these songs. You can find three main subjects in their tunes, those three are; sad, happy, informative, or passing time.
After my assigned nightly reading, the biggest idea about the book Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson, was what does the scar symbolize? I thought the scar meant power, because it shows how Isabel is strong. “This is my country mark.”(286), said by Isabel. This quote is showing how Isabel finds out that this scar makes her strong and how she was her fathers daughter. What I’m trying to say is the scar changes from showing pain, now the scar makes her stronger. When Isabel was looking at the mirror she said, “This mark stands for Isabel.”(286) This made Isabel believe that the scar wasn’t bad, but it was a good thing. She has to go through pain to find freedom, and to be shown that she has hope.
Slave-owners forced a perverse form of Christianity, one that condoned slavery, upon slaves. According to this false Christianity the enslavement of “black Africans is justified because they are the descendants of Ham, one of Noah's sons; in one Biblical story, Noah cursed Ham's descendants to be slaves” (Tolson 272). Slavery was further validated by the numerous examples of it within the bible. It was reasoned that these examples were confirmation that God condoned slavery. Douglass’s master...
" From the deep and the near South the sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves wander into the city...isolated, cut off from memory...they arrive stunned with a song worth singing..their pockets lined with fresh hope, marked men and women seeking to scrape from the narrow..shaping the malleable parts of themselves into a new identity as a free man of definite and sincere worth.
Douglass’ explains his view of religion as “When I think that these precious souls are to-day shut up in the prison-house of slavery, my feelings overcome me, and I am almost ready to ask, “Does a righteous God govern the universe? And for what does he hold the thunders in his right hand, if not to smite the oppressor, and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the spoiler? (p.48).” He wonders how a righteous God can rule the universe, and yet still allow cruel things like slavery to exist. One of the ways Douglass shows himself to be a Christian, is by quoting the Bible, “Dark and terrible as is this picture, I hold it to be s...
African-American slaves may not have had the formal education that many of their white slave owners possessed, but they intuitively knew that the labor they toiled through each and every day was unjust. This dynamic of unfairness brought about a mindset in which slaves would critique the workings of slavery. To many people’s understanding, slavery was an invasively oppressive institution; Levine however, noted, “for all its horrors, slavery was never so complete a system of psychic assault that it prevented the slaves from carving out independent cultural forms” . Slave spirituals were a part of the independent cultural form that enslaved African-Americans produced; these songs had numerous functions and critiquing slavery served as one of
In alignment with what the Bible told them, abolitionist understood that each man represented one of God’s creations and that men were part of God’s plan. If slavery was allowed to exist, then man was interrupting God’s de...
Overall, the fact that their bodies were not their own was perhaps the most terrible component of slavery for women-they were looked upon as sexual objects that existed for their masters to enact their most depraved sexual fantasies upon rather than a human being. Jacobs tries to give full emphasis to this fact in order to sway the sentiments of northern readers, particularly white women who would be most likely empathetic to her predicament. A Christian master knew the word of God or what we would call the teachings of the Bible, so he was able to intentionally misconstrue biblical verses to his advantage. Yet, white southern “Christians” committed these cruel acts, believing their behaviors were neither wrong nor immoral (BN 1).
Moreover, many owners later came to feel that Christianity may actually have encouraged rebellion (all those stories of Moses and the Israelites in Egypt, after all, talked about the liberation of the slaves), and so they began to discourage Christian missionaries from preaching to the slaves. African Americans have taken their own spiritual, religious journey. God was looked upon as a source of peace and encouragement. The community of enslave Africans were able to use religion and spirituality as a way of overcoming the mental anguish of slavery on a daily basis. To a slave, religion was the most important aspect of their life. Nothing could come between their relationship with god. It was their rock, the only reason why they could wake up in the morning, the only way that they endured this most turbulent time in our history.
He tells them that suffering is God’s greatest gift and that those who suffer will be rewarded. Some of the slaves accept the religion as truth, while others are less eager to believe everything the Count says. Jaques Lacan in Bhabha’s Of Mimicry and Man, states “the effect of mimicry is camouflage…It is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of becoming mottled- exactly like the technique of camouflage practiced in human warfare” (Bhabha, 85). The slaves are forced to mimic the slave owner’s religion. If they were to have kept their own religion, that would be an aspect of them that the colonizer wouldn’t be able to understand and, therefore, wouldn’t be able to
Music is an art and a wonderful gift to human race. It soothes, stimulates and makes us feel happy. It affects our moods in many different ways from lullaby to war cry for changes in the society. Music is actually distinct to different people. Above all, it has a transformational importance that is captured in its art and nature. Music draws our emotions and it has an impact of bridging different cultures across the continents. Slave songs were very vital channels through which all kind of information was conveyed both positive and negative.
African-American music is a vibrant art form that describes the difficult lives of African American people. This can be proven by examining slave music, which shows its listeners how the slaves felt when they were working, and gives us insight into the problems of slavery; the blues, which expresses the significant connection with American history, discusses what the American spirit looks like and teaches a great deal from the stories it tells; and hip-hop, which started on the streets and includes topics such as misogyny, sex, and black-on-black violence to reveal the reactions to the circumstances faced by modern African Americans. First is about the effect of slave music on American history and African American music. The slave music’s
... is invoking language of the Christ’s crucifixion on the cross by the Romans. Stowe makes an analogous statement to this in describing the daily plight of black slaves. Most whites view the system of slavery as natural; they see black as inferior to them and therefore designed to serve them based on the color of their skin. Blacks however see bondage through the forced biblical paradigm that has been imposed upon them. Stowe makes the analogy that African Americans suffer daily in bondage like Christ suffered on the cross.