avery community utilized as a means to blind and desensitize whites to the cruel realities of their institution. As exemplified in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the collective oppression of blacks minds? by way of depriving them literacy was the most central element in the perpetuation of slavery.
             One of the foremost uses of the laws prohibiting literacy was to help further the stereotypes of the mid nineteenth century. By keeping blacks uneducated, it was easy for whites to distinguish themselves on account of what they deemed to be their superior intellects. Whereas this vantage was merely derived on account of the oppression of ones fellow man, the vast majority of whites failed to recognize that their assumed superior intellect was entirely fraudulent. Nonetheless, the separation posed by literacy functioned as a thick enough buffer between slave owners and the brutal nature of their trade. By dehumanizing an entire race of people, whites could free themselves from any potential burden of guilt that would seem to naturally ensue from orchestrating such an inhumane system. It should be argued, that this collective self-deception was implemented at a subconscious level, as the majority of whites were notchoosing? to think this way, but they had been socially conditioned to do so. And if realizations of the matter had even began to surface in the mind of a slave owner, the recognition of the economic prosperity derived from slavery was enough to squash any such freethinking ways.
             Furthermore, the dehumanizing of blacks extended not only to white mentalities, but to many of the enslaved as well. When all they knew was degradation, slaves were actually led to view themselves with less worth than whites. Through decades of cruelty, the spirit of t
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