When looking at Barbara Field’s and Omi and Winant’s theoretical models within the narrative of Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom, it can be observed that racial projects are a large proponent of creating and recreating the ideology of race in social structures. It is through the distribution of materials and divisions of peoples by racial distinctions that the ideology of race is reaffirmed throughout the records of Frederick Douglass. Reading and understanding the narrative through the modes of these two theories provide a unique and expository lens to the functionality and flaws of the racial institution that controlled the social structure of the time.
Omi and Winant define a racial project to be, “simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines. Racial projects connect what race means in a particular discursive practice and the ways in which both social structures and everyday experiences are racially organized, based upon that meaning” (Omi and Winant, p. 125). Racial projects take the concept of race, as well as the social structures of a given community or population, and combine them in order to divide supplies and resources along racial lines.
In Barbara Field’s Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America she details her theory on racial ideology, in her definition, “supplied the means of explaining slavery to people whose terrain was a republic founded on racial doctrines of liberty and natural rights…a republic in which those doctrines seemed to represent accurately the world in which all but minority lived” (Fields, p. 114). The “terrain” she speaks of can be thought of similarly to that of racial lines: a resource guide that details what the dominant and controlling social group, white people, receive and allow themselves to prosper with, and that in which the other groups, enslaved people and non-whites, cannot have. The way in which ideology is narrated throughout My Bondage and My Freedom is through the way that slave owners justify their actions and attitudes with regards to race and racial divisions. It is necessary to have a vessel in which these ideals can be enforced and modified through time, and these modes of transport are racial projects.
Racial projects existing in My Bondage My Freedom divide resources quite obviously down the racial line of white people and non-white people. When discussing the idea of education as a means of emancipation, Frederick Douglass’ knowledge of education as a passage to freedom was mostly based off of his masters discontent with him learning to read, "’he should know nothing but the will of his master, and learn to obey it.’…‘If you learn him now to read, he'll want to know how to write; and, this accomplished, he'll be running away with himself.’”(Douglass, p. 146). In shorter words than those of the master, it can be understood that firstly, slave owners allotted the only duties of a slave to be exclusively to listen and follow directions, and secondly, that education has no place in the hands of a slave for it would allow him freedom in his choices. Education was a threat to the unstable racial project that was slavery, and allowing access to that resource beyond racial lines, illustrated by the white dictatorship in power, was strictly forbidden.
An additional resource, not as material as the concept of education, is that of family dynamics. Throughout the narrative, but focusing towards the opening of the narrative, Douglass explains the deliberate dismemberment of families by means of slavery, and the significant role that it plays in constructing social dynamics of the time. When describing this, he says “The practice of separating children from their mothers… is a marked feature of the cruelty and barbarity of the slave system. But it is in harmony with the grand aim of slavery, which, always and everywhere, is to reduce man to a level with the brute. It is a successful method of obliterating from the mind and heart of the slave, all just ideas of the sacredness of the family, as an institution” (Douglass, p. 38). The partitioning of thousands of families, seen as a racial project, attributes to the continuous remaking of a sociohistorical schema, or ideology, of which both sides of the process see.
On the one side, white slave owners allow themselves to see profitable machines of capitalism, and lack the perception of a man and his family, for their ideology does not see a man with a family. On the contrary, slaves that are never raised without the traditional ideals and consecrated conception of family relations separate another resource on either side of a racial divide. In itself, the action of breaking apart families and culturally distinct African populations is a racial project. The effects that it has on white populations and enslaved peoples rebuilds and dominates the ideology of racial structures, demoting the slaves to have no family and therefore held at a lower level of class and humanity than those with families.
The slave holding class used the practice of Christianity as a racial project in which to explain the separation of natural human rights between different races. Christianizing slaves, using aspects of the Bible such as the story of Ham to justify the enslavement of black people, was an attempt to further belittle and control the slave class, for they are teaching the belief of the holiness of God next to the subversion of a certain people. Using Omi and Winant’s assertion of, “In turn, every racial project attempts to reproduce, extend, subvert, or directly challenge that (social) system” (Omi and Winant, p. 125), it is understood that the slave owners were reproducing the structure of dominance with those teachings, but it also allows for the challenge of the system to be explored. This is most obvious when Douglass questions the legitimacy of the story of Ham with the argument of mixed races, “But, I may remark, that, if the lineal descendants of Ham are only to be enslaved, according to the scriptures, slavery in this country will soon become an unscriptural institution; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who–like myself–owe their existence to white fathers, and, most frequently, to their masters, and master's sons” (Douglass, p. 60). The racial ideology is therefore devoid of reason, and Christian religion plays a position in the destruction of the concept as well. In addition, Douglass often discusses the excessive brutality of religious slaveholders, although the religion teaches nothing of the sort.
The ideology that slave owners viewed black people as not human, not equals, and not endowed to any rights becomes even more solidly concrete when thought of in terms of religion. To be a slave owner and deny any of the sayings of God to be applied to slaves is to completely believe that there is not a sliver of human inside a slave. Therefore, it is completely justified, in their eyes, to brutalize and kill those who are only mentioned as those who need the white man’s saving, the children of Ham. To elaborate, Douglass argues, “For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have found them, almost invariably, the vilest, meanest and basest of their class…Religious slaveholders, like religious persecutors, are ever extreme in their malice and violence” (Douglass, p. 258). With the belief and ideology of slaves not being people, religious owners can use the excuse of God given rights by color sorting to take advantage of slaves on their own schedule.
The largest threat to the institution of slavery and the ideology of race in America as a whole is best explained by slaveholders, specifically in the accidental contradictions Douglass recounts. Often in the statements made by Douglass’ master lie the caveat to his ideological stance on race. When he is discussing that slaves should not learn to read, his master says “it would forever unfit him for the duties of a slave” (Douglass, p. 146). He admits, to a degree, that his way of operating and enforcing rules is flawed if there exists an attainable freedom through the skill of writing. The flaws in the ethics that so strictly conduct the choices and actions of their life reveal just how broken the idea of racial essentialism is.
When reading My Bondage and My Freedom in context of Field’s concept of racial ideology, one can see the foundations of the mindset, perspective, and moral state of mind being laid out through every story that Douglass recounts. Whether it be seemingly-smaller skills, like not learning manners the same way white children were instructed, or larger structural aspects, like the teaching of religion, they work towards instituting the white structures of dominance into the societal understanding of what racial ideology is. Examining Douglass’ experiences in light of Omi and Winant’s theories of racial projects, the foundation on which race as an ideology sits is rebuilt, strengthened, and modified through the partitioning of physical and theoretical resources.