In short, it is a terrible blow to reduce the enslaved to the status of an animal. From his own experience of being enslaved, Frederick Douglass shows the pitfalls inherent in these manœuvres aimed at reversing the causes and effects of oppression and enslavement:  
Ignorance and depravity, he says, and the inability to rise from degradation to civilisation and respectability are the most common allegations made with regard to the oppressed. The evils of slavery and oppression are precisely those that the owners of slaves and oppressors would like to assign from their system to the natural character of their victims. In this way, the very crimes of slavery become the very best defence of slavery (F. Douglass, quoted by Gates, 1995, p. 94).  
However, in addition to the power of images and prejudices, the register of myth and religion is mobilized in turn to give the most misleading insinuations more weight. From this point onwards, negritude, stupidity, ugliness and turpitude are presented as obvious signs of a congenitally weak, deceitful and hypocritical nature. We find in the work of Ibn Qutayba, a former disciple of al-Djāhiz who ended up turning his back on his master's thinking, an eloquent testimony to the way in which this gradual and progressive shift in the ethic stereotype slid towards contempt and stigma. In a passage in his work Kitäb al-Ma'ārif, Ibn Qutayba returns to the question of blacks, the Sūdān and the so-called divine curse. To do this he appeals to the authority of Wahb Ibn al-Munabbih (born in the mid-eleventh century), a Christian of Yemeni descent who was honoured and celebrated for his immense knowledge of the Bible and Talmud. Ibn Qutayba states that in the beginning, blacks were white, beautiful and radiant, before Noah cast his curse on the children of Ham: