Tucker C. Toole
ENG 265
Dr. Ligon
3/5/2020
Ignorance Within Oppression
Racism is another word for ignorance. There has never indeed been a time when racial ignorance has not been prevalent or alive within the United States. It was especially present during the Antebellum period, as well as the Harlem Renaissance. During these eras, literary scholars Frederick Douglass and Zora Neale Hurston had first-hand experiences of the blatant ignorance of their oppressors and those oppressed within their respective ages. Ignorance or lack of understanding has been one of the overarching setbacks to racial progression. Through the lens of Frederick Douglass and Zora Neale Hurston, we see ignorance from the sides of the oppressor and the oppressed.
Rather than being built on the idea of freedom and liberty, America was built on inconsistencies that appeared to be truths. Speaking in Rochester, New York, in 1852, Fredrick Douglas addressed the tensions between promises and practices that had been resolvedin favor of pledges lest the nation be destroyed. The scholar highlighted the constitution of the United States as an abolition document rather than a pro-slavery document. Douglas linked the cause of freedom for the slave to the independence of America. He made the signers of the declaration within the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society he was speaking to into posthumous abolitionists. He still believed that racism and slavery could come to an end as he stated: “With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression” (Douglass 1852).
During the Harlem Renaissance, ignorance was embedded in self-segregation. Hurston was ignorant of her skin colorand claimed to be living a whole-souled and self-possessed life imbued with racial health. Throughout her life, from childhood, she was comfortable with her surroundings since she lived in Eatonville, a town for the blacks. However, with time, she stopped being ignorant of her race as she writes, “When I disembarked from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County anymore, I was now a little colored girl” (Hurston 1928). She, however, was comfortable with her skin and readily acknowledged the differences associated with skin color as she wrote: “During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there.” (Hurston 1928). To her, being colored and being an Americancitizen is one feeling that cannot be separated..[create_order]
The antebellum period and the HarlemRenaissance were marked by ignorance and racism. The two scholars openly addressed the ignorance of the oppressors and the oppressed during their era’s and made a revelation concerning America being racially inadequate. Great injustices against black Americans marked the periods. Fredrick reveals the paradox of positive in which something positive was discriminatory, and the blacks were not allowed to share in its benefits and called America to be true to its principles: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Douglass 1852). Hurston, on the other hand, encouraged people in her time to accept their races and, rather than focusing on what set them apart, concentrate on their self-awareness and the similarities they had in common with the whites.