"The Negro Boy" is a sombre poem which recounts the horrors of slavery. The poem switches tenses and allows the white reader to experience the forcible loss of one's community and freedom and the cruelty that is the slave trade from the perspective of a little boy. As an anti-Slavery, pro-Abolition text, "The Negro Boy" follows a common feature of Western depictions of non-Westerners by conceptualising an entire foreign society as a non-threatening figure such as a child or a beautiful young woman, whom a sophisticated Western "man" could take care of and protect. Depicting the process of a massive cultural genocide of West Africans as an innocent little boy being exploited and harassed by the white man's quest for profit is an effective means to summon support for views against slavery. This poems allows the reader to fine-tune their sympathy to a single, ficticious (although highly probable) human example.