Enslaved people claimed the masters’ own ideals more seriously than their masters did
Evidence
Ralph Ellison reminds us, “The slaves often took the essence of the aristocratic ideal (as they took Christianity) with far more seriousness than their masters” (1964, xiv). In their language, in their religion with its focus on the Exodus theme and on Jesus’s tribulations (Glaude 2000), in their music with its figuring of suffering, resistance, perseverance, and transcendence (Du Bois 2007 (1935), in their interrogation of a political philosophy which sought perpetually to rationalize their bondage ina supposedly “free” society and theoretical synthesis of the themes and issues of black feminist thought. — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 135
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- SEED: Could be an essay angle: how oppressed groups weaponize the dominant class’s professed ideals against it — the slave taking Christianity and aristocracy more literally than the master.
Related
- The oppressed embraced the masters’ ideals more sincerely than the masters did (similarity 0.91)
- Enslaved people regarded religious masters as the worst masters (similarity 0.82)
- Slaveowners saw Christianized slaves as more rebellious and poorer workers (similarity 0.81)
- American social science long argued that slaves internalized submissive habits (similarity 0.79)
- Enslaved people continually resisted the structure of bondage rather than accommodating to it. (similarity 0.79)
- Slaves formed their own consciousness independent of planter ideology. (similarity 0.79)
- Enslavement paradoxically made Black people the most American Americans. (similarity 0.78)