Why do you think it was important for slave owners to keep slaves ignorant about their birthdays and parentage? Douglass opens his story in Narrative...

When
Douglass says that slaves know as little about the circumstances or dates of their births as
horses do, that one small comparison of enslaved human beings to a farm animal suggests a lot
about why slave owners kept their slaves' birthdays and parentage from them.

The slave owners wanted to dehumanize the slaves as much as possible. As Douglass
himself points out, slave owners saw slaves inquiring about their birthday as having
"restless spirit"sthese are people who want to be individuals and refuse to be seen as
expendable chattel.

The reasoning is much the same with keeping slave
parentage secret. People feel a sense of identity with their families. Even today, people love
knowing where their ancestors came from and their cultural heritage. Slaves were denied this
basic comfort. Once again, slave owners did not want the slaves to develop personhood. They
wanted to keep them in submission to their owners. Even something as basic as a parent-child
relationship stood in the way of...