With such facts as these before me—and I have many of them—I am inclined to think that pride and fashion have much to do with the treatment commonly extended to colored people in the United States.
From his autobiography, Douglass reflects on how social status and appearance influence the treatment of Black people.
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The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.
Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.
We could not but believe that there existed at the South a latent and powerful Union sentiment which would assert itself at last.