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Ass.3 Karla Flores

Society has always seemed intimidated by a woman’s figure. Jennifer Morgan discusses how the female body played a major role on what we know as racism. This concept or belief was created by men, in order to have more power over valuable items or concepts. When the Americas were discovered, the differences between natives and europeans were inevitable to ignore. Coming from a more advanced place and environment, the europeans knew what to do to to secure power over the natives. They took both male and females and enslaved them, just based on physical differences. Native women did not have the same image as some of the other females who were “educated” to behave and act a certain way. This gave them the opportunity to comprare the image of strong black women to the one of the european women. These African slaves were not what these men were used to seeing, they had already been used to how their women looked like and it would a more “innocent” and “delicate” way. Female slaves were seemed as a machine that would produce money for them in every way possible. Europeans already had a different perception of what beaty was to them, and black women were not part of that definition for them. What in reality was beautiful, became a sign of threat to them. The female body was the a symbol of burden, in which anything and everything that came from it was considered bad. Europeans came into these new environments to change the way females were used to live. Seeing how normal giving birth seemed to the natives, Europeans took this opportunity to ponish them in a way. They were not used to seeing people reproduce like this, so the female body became a business for the white men. This just goes to show how ignorance in both sides led to the birth of racism.

Question: How do you think European women judge these black slaves for being “different”?