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Frederick Douglass: Social Norm

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Frederick Douglass: Social Norm
To begin with, Douglass and Wright would respond to each other’s experience with knowledge by stating that they both developed self-hatred. In the case of Frederick Douglass, being a slave with acquired knowledge, did not only caused fury in his heart, but it also made him feel less of a human because he couldn’t process the notion of being sold as a slave and being deprived of the simplest human right: freedom. At the same time, Douglass felt hate inside because he got to realize after twelve years of slavery that this situation was part of the “social norm” during that point in history. As an attempt to express his frustration towards this situation, Douglass states the following: “I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing …show more content…
This cultural discrimination against people of color created this image in Wright's mind of him being no less than an outcast in society. The notion of Richard Wright feeling melancholy and despair regarding this cruel reality can be found in the following quotation: “My days and nights were one long, quiet, consciously contained dream of terror, tension, and anxiety” (Wright 353). In this part of the essay, the author is writing about the different emotions that he is experiencing as he is going through the process of expanding his knowledge and obtaining an intellectual life. This part of the essay illustrates how frustrating it is for Richard Wright to continue the process of gaining knowledge in the form of education. Wright describes how the more he reads about his historical background, the more he finds himself distanced from the world he is living in because he cannot accept the reality of it. Both Douglass and Wright, get to a point where they both experience feeling debilitated by the possession of knowledge, because even though it is a powerful tool that can be used to their advantage, it is also causing them an emotional damage, making them feel hopeless and with their dreams and aspirations crushed by the brutality of the real
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