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Assignment 3: Know Supremacy, Know Thyself…and Dismantle It

When dealing with Jennifer Morgan’s ideas in the first chapter of Laboring Women, I found it both incredibly jarring and enlightening to grapple with firsthand ideas of post-1300’s colonialism and racism. Studying the theoretical principles behind these ideas was one thing—especially when dealt with through the arguably “diluting” lens of political correctness that permeates contemporary American culture in addition to my own experiences as a cisgender Filipino American male who has lived in communities with others like myself for most of my life. But to deal with the startlingly raw and unabashed racism that is interwoven into these seemingly “benign” portraits of the “New World”1 gave me new insight into what it must be like to live as someone whose otherness is a more intrinsic aspect of their existence in today’s violently prejudiced world.

I found most startling was Morgan’s discussion on the “discursive place of black women” (14-15), in which she explains how black female bodies were at first exotified and capable of evoking desire then almost simultaneously vilified and used as proof that their respective peoples were uncivilized and monstrous. This incongruity highlights how essential the conception of “otherness” (as we understand it today) was essential to the construction of Western European supremacy (and what would inevitably become white supremacy). For it was in the creation of the savage that “civilized society” came into being, in the realization of the “monstrous” that their subjugation and enslavement became justifiable, in the vilification and dehumanization of the black body that anything associated with Western European culture, ideas, and mannerisms—or “whiteness” in general—became superior.

When considering these ideas and their contemporary anti-theses—the disproving of racial eugenics as pseudo-science, that humans are one of the most genetically similar species on the planet, and that whiteness should not persist as the be-all and end-all of anything associated with superiority—the question I would have liked to ask is by what logic and by what utter lack of sense are these ideas of racial superiority allowed to persist? Why and how are these relatively young ideas of racial hegemony so utterly ingrained into our collective psyches? And what can we do to unlearn and help others unlearn this vast colonization of our cultures and our minds?