W.e.b Dubois . help please help in not sure how to interpret this ?

Question

·     “By the middle of the eighteenth century, the black slave had sunk, with hushed murmurs, to his place at the bottom of a new economic system and was unconsciously ripe for a new philosophy of life.  Nothing suited his condition then better than the doctrines of passive submission embodied in the newly learned Christianity.  Slave masters early realized this, and cheerfully aided religious propaganda within certain bounds.  The long system of repression and degradation of the Negro tended to emphasize the elements of his character which made him a valuable chattel: courtesy became humility, moral strength degenerated into submission, and the exquisite native appreciation of the beautiful became an infinite capacity for dumb suffering.  The Negro, losing the joy of this world, eagerly seized upon the offered conceptions of the next...” (Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in E & A, p. 382).

Answer 1

What exactly are you unclear about? What is the context in which you need to understand this better?