Frederick Douglass Inequality of Circumstances:

Frederick Douglass

Inequality of Circumstances: The experiences of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth

The experiences of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth force Americans to rethink the idea that all people are created equal. This statement seems to imply that everyone who is a human being begins with the same basic tools of self-improvement. The idea that everybody has the ability to succeed, so long as they work hard, is one of the cherished ideals of America. America is supposed to be a perfect meritocracy, where all people are created equal. However, the experiences of these Black individuals highlight how equality is not based simply in personal merit or the state of being human. Equality depends upon access to social and economic opportunities. In their early lives, Douglass and Truth had neither, although they were able to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles to literacy and advancement. But they were clear, in their later careers as writers and speakers that merely because they were able to advance, did not mean that all people could under their circumstances.

Frederick Douglass was born a slave, in a world where her could be bought and sold. It was a crime in the South for a slave to be literate. Even an impoverished White person with little opportunities for advancement could legally learn how to read. Douglass could not. The ability to advance himself in a free and equal manner was inhibited by the legal limits of his age. Douglass' innate intelligence and merit is manifest in the fact that as an adult he was slowly and painfully able to teach himself to read, in secret as an adult. But although Douglass became a great writer and speaker, this hardly equates with being born equal. He was often forced to learn by trickery: "when I met with any boy who I knew could write, I would tell him I could write as well as he. The next word would be, 'I don't believe you. Let me see you try it.' I would then make the letters which I had been so fortunate as to learn, and ask him to beat that. In this way I got a good many lessons in writing, which it is quite possible I should never have gotten in any other way" (Douglass, Chapter 7). Through luck and hard work, Douglass was able to gain something of an education, but his experience, like his release from bondage before Emancipation, he stated was hardly the norm. Equality and freedom needed to be extended to all Black Americans.

Sojourner Truth's speech "Ain't I a Woman?" chronicles the seemingly endless catalogue of hardships she endured as a female slave, without any self-pity. Although a member of the supposedly weaker sex, and the mother of many children, she was still expected to work hard. As a Black woman, she was forced to work doubly hard against societal racism and prejudice against her gender. She worked as hard as a man but was not rewarded for her labor, monetarily, because she was a slave according to the letter of the law. The efforts of her labor were ignored because supposedly a woman 'couldn't work' due to the fragility of her sex: "Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well!" (Truth, 1841) Truth's experiences show how social institutions are not fair, and can limit opportunity based upon a person's gender or race, or both.