Q: What was Frederick Douglass theory for how to break a slave?
A: Douglass thought that to break a slave, "you must make a thoughtless one... He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery. The man who takes his earnings must be able to convince him that he has a perfect right to do so. It must not depend on mere force - the slave must know no higher law than his master's will. The whole relationship must not only demonstrate to his mind its necessity, but its absolute rightfulness." This basically means that to break a slave, you have to convince them that what is being done to them is right. They can't believe that anything going on around them isn't how it should be, nothing is wrong with the fact that they have their pay taken away, that they have no rights, etc.
Q: Why wasn't Frederick Douglass aloud to read?
A: Douglass wasn't aloud to read because Hugh Auld - like most slave-owners/white supremacists believed back then - believed that if he started reading books then he would begin forming his own thoughts about the world. As he put it, "Learning will spoil the best nigger in the world". If Douglass began to read, then he would see the problems with slavery and why it was wrong, he would likely rebel against the Auld's and refuse to live as a slave.
Q: Why were slaves viewed as child-like?
A: The blacks that were viewed as child-like were actually mainly those who were free in the North. However, they were not free from the same terrible racial discrimination that slaves received in the South. They were seen as "immature", "indolent", and "good-for-nothing" as it says in the reading. One thing whites used to justify this was the study of Dr. Samuel Morton. Morton concluded that the skulls of whites being larger than black showed the difference in intelligence between the two, even though the skulls were those of white criminals. Whites really used everything they could to justify their discrimination against blacks, even though there was never any factual scientific evidence to support their case, if there was one little thing that was different between the two, they used that as some justification to say that whites were better than blacks.
