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Robert Walczak Assignment 3

In the first chapter of Jennifer Morgan’s book, she talks of how English writers depicted black women as taking the beauty of the female body but introduced a black savage nature to themselves as beings that only had two purposes in life. To produce crops and to produce other people, one writer talks about how the body of a black woman was similar to a monster with how when they bent over they looked like they had six legs. The nudity of African woman as well as having sagging breasts made them targets for Europeans to call uncivilized and savage in comparison to white women. This was done to show that people that black women only looked female but where something else when compared to Europeans. This description could have been used by some to justify their enslavement and what slaveowners were to do with them. The other tales of African women such as their ability to give birth to a child and not be hindered by it to still do field work only helped others think that labor was what they were born for and would be of use in the Americas. Other examples of how African women show their ability for labor was with even when working because of their sagging breasts, they merely had to throw it over their shoulder and have it that way to feed their children. With more ways of how African woman were described Europeans thought themselves to be superior because each tale made them look less and less human. With the extreme differences between the cultures of both Europeans and Africans, Europeans saw them as inferior due to their openness to nudity, how their women were based on their masculine looks and could work while with child. Morgan shows how the looks of African women were used by Europeans to portray them as animals fit only for work and creating more workers. They used these depictions as a justification to enslave the African people as they were to different in comparison to them.

Question: Why did the Europeans think that people of a completely different land would have the same culture as them and when they didn’t, immediately concluded that they were inferior because of it?