An unknown freed slave describes the white masters' justification for subjugating the African (1789). Do we not hear similar reasoning in our own day?
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2/ "[I]t is said we are men, it is true; but that we are men addicted to more and worse vices than those of any other complexion; and such is the innate perverseness of our minds that nature seems to have marked us out for slavery.—
3/ Such is the apology perpetually made for our masters and the justification offered for that universal proscription under which we labor.
4/ … Though avarice may slander and insult our misery, & though poets heighten the horror of their fables by representing us as monsters of vice—that fact is that, if treated like other men, & admitted to a participation of their rights, we should differ from them in nothing,...
5/ ...perhaps, but in our possessing stronger passions, nicer sensibility, and more enthusiastic virtue.
[O]ur enemies have laid down other and stricter rules of morality to judge our actions by than those by which the conduct of all other men is tried.
[O]ur enemies have laid down other and stricter rules of morality to judge our actions by than those by which the conduct of all other men is tried.
6/ Habits, which in all human beings except ourselves are thought innocent, are, in us, deemed criminal—and actions, which are even laudable in white men, become enormous crimes in Negroes."
7/ He describes also the hypocritical nature of the Briton's venerations:
"I read in authors whom I find venerated by our oppressors, that to deliver one's self and one's countrymen from tyranny is an act of the sublimest heroism.
"I read in authors whom I find venerated by our oppressors, that to deliver one's self and one's countrymen from tyranny is an act of the sublimest heroism.
8/ I hear Europeans exalted as the martyrs of public liberty, the saviors of their country, and the deliverers of mankind—I see other memories honored with statues, and their names immortalized in poetry—
9/ ...and yet when a generous Negro is animated by the same passion which ennobled them—when he feels the wrongs of his countrymen as deeply, and attempts to avenge them as boldly—I see him treated by those same Europeans as the most execrable of mankind, ...
10/ ... and led out, amidst curses end insults, to undergo a painful, gradual and ignominious death. Thus the same Briton, who applauds his own ancestors for attempting to throw off the easy yoke imposed on them by the Romans, punishes us, as detested parricides, ...
11/ ... for seeking to get free from the cruelest of all tyrannies, and yielding to the irresistible eloquence of an African Galgacus or Boadicea.
12/ Are then the reason and morality, for which Europeans so highly value themselves, of a nature so variable and fluctuating as to change with the complexion of those to whom they are applied?—Do rights of nature cease to be such when a Negro is to enjoy them?—
13/ Or does patriotism in the heart of an African rankle into treason?"
Source: blackpast.org/1789-unknown-f…
Source: blackpast.org/1789-unknown-f…
