“WHEN EUROPEANS WERE SLAVES: RESEARCH SUGGESTS WHITE SLAVERY WAS MUCH MORE COMMON THAN PREVIOUSLY BELIEVED” Robert Davis, Research Ohio State. Jan 14

This piece was extremely eye opening in the fact that it talked all about how much European Culture has ignored the idea of white enslavement. This notion was brought up rarely in the education that I have had on slavery. Yet, why have another article on slavery, and more importantly why on slavery of those that were from America and/or Europe? What does this topic have to do with the concept of gender and power? One of the conclusions that can be drawn from this is that not everything is, as it seems in the eyes of American studies of the history of discrimination against a certain race, a certain culture, and a certain gender. Opening up one’s mind to the way world is truly, not the way society and one’s own culture teaches one to see it is a true challenge for the average, educated American. This piece, if anything, has taught me that one must be open to challenged stereotypes and may have to realize the way the world is through one’s eyes may be much different from how the world truly works and all of it’s history. When reading of how enslaved Europeans were treated just as inhumanly as those that were enslaved from Africa, the image of slavery did not change in my mind, and I still saw the African slave trade as so much worse. Yet why I do not see these slave trades as equal is because images and countless information just focusing on African slavery has been engraved into my head for years and years, just as the image of what a man is in American society versus a woman in American society. It goes to show that the complexities of repeated information and repeated stereotypes could be a hard thing to see differently, but is necessary if one wants to know the world better.

Jan 14th Reading Response: What Does the Word “Race” Truly Mean?

“Chapter 1: Racism, history, and politics,” Racism: Beginner’s Guide, Alana Lenten, Oxford: Oneworld, 2008, 1-31.

Growing up in a small town on the Western side of Washington, when the word race came to mind, the blunt idea of black people being segregated from white, upper class always came to mind. Of course I never considered myself racist, I have been instilled to treat every human being with the respect I would want to be treated with, but when it comes to the actual term of race I can honestly say I have never looked beyond the physical aspects of the meanings attached to it. The idea of racism emerging in a scientific setting has never even crossed my mind, and how Voegelin came about the idea that “-race as composed of a set of false notions with no actual basis in provable scientific fact” (8). So race as simply a definition of ethnicity, unaffected by culture or mannerism associated with a certain race, is where the idea of racism began it seems. Which is extremely ironic in the fact that some saw it as so simple and ineffective in society, yet racism was and is and what it has become and how it continues to suppress and grow in parts of the world is so complex and deep. Yet the question of “how racism became so complex in the first place?” is what keeps emerging through out the readings. The connection between Darwin’s theory of natural selection and what racism is defined as today was a huge stepping stone is elevating what racism is seen as and viewed as today. What makes a race superior? What is superiority in society? Finding what it means to be a superior race is a cultural issue so many societies have as a result of Darwinism and the support and spread of European culture.