Frederick Douglass, in his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, and Maxine Hong Kingston, in her autobiography The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, tell of their struggle against and victory over the chains of racism and sexism. Both Douglass and Kingston eventually find the freedom, identity and self-worth they seek, and both stories prove that the ideologies behind their oppression--that black men and Chinese women are inferior to whites--are not only bigoted but utterly wrong. Kingston and Douglass emerge from their oppression as shining examples of humanity at its most intelligent and determined to live in freedom.
Douglass struggles against his literal slavery and turns himself into an educated and independent human being. Kingston is enslaved by the sexist system of America (and China, insofar as that system is transplanted to Chinese child-rearing and female self-identity in the United States) and the racist society of America. Both Kingston and Douglass are able to overcome their shackles through self-knowledge, education and determined hard work.
Douglass uses education and religion to sustain his spirit and eventually win his liberty. There is no sign of freedom in the early sections of Douglass' autobiography, but only slaves who have their freedom taken from them in the horror of slavery, and slaveowners who commit those horrors. Douglass learns that to be a free human being he must learn to read, must become educated, must be able to think and work for himself. He sees that the slave with no education and no hope for the future is not a fully human being. Douglass has much awareness of his own position, an awareness which is necessary for any oppressed person if he or she is to have any hope of overcoming his or her oppressors.
The slaveholders determinedly kept the slaves uneducated because such ignorance made them easier to c...