What separates people of color from everyone else is opportunity. Opportunity or equality, is the oppression of the privileged. Oppression on the privileged, incentivizes these people in power to protect and secure their socioeconomic status and quality of life. To do so, a system of oppression must be created to systematically oppress a specific group of people to secure and maximize privileges/opportunities. White supremacy and slavery were one of many forms used to securing or improving white Europeans socioeconomic status and quality of life. In the following, we will discuss how white supremacy affected and shaped the development of African American culture. Furthermore, examine how colorism, a manifestation of white supremacy, affected
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White supremacy was developed on the notion that dark skin represents barbarianissm, irrationality, unpleasant aesthetics and inferiority. As a result of this notion, white supremacists began to impose their culture, beliefs and faiths onto the “savages”-Africans. In Robert Hayden’s literature work, Middle Passage, the reader relives the experience and thought process of a slave who is being transported from Africa to the New World. The Middle Passage is spoken in the first person by a slave whose name is not mentioned. “We had forgotten our sires’ plumed and charioted splendors, our past ivory image buried...our false god to us, our king betraying us”(Hayden 248). As the reader, we begin to understand how beliefs that were once held true to the slave, was now a fallacy. “America, where we were freed from our unspeakable misery”(Hayden 253). African beliefs and cultures became a fallacy when white supremacy positioned itself as the savior of the barbarian race. That African culture and practices were completely wrong and needs to be guided by an intelligent being-white Europeans. Thus, the emergence of self definition took effect, cutlture was stripeed away because white Europeans believed Africans had everything wrong. In the film, 12 Years A Slave, we see the same effect of targeting identity as a way to impose slavery on the main character, Solomon Northup. Solomon …show more content…
Phase 1, white supremacists falsified African culture, beliefs and identity, leaving Africans vulnerable and in search for self definition. Phase 2, validating slavery through law, and religious literature while simultaneously dehumanizing people of color. Toni Morrison book A Mercy, is narrated in the first person by Florens, a slave of Portuguese and African background. “A third of his cargo had died of ship fever. Fined five thousand pounds of tobacco by the Lord Proprietarys’ magistrate for throwing their bodies too close to the bay; forced to scoop up the corpses— those they could find (they used pikes and nets)...He’d had to pile them in two drays (six shillings), cart them out to low land where saltweed and alligators would finish the work”(Morrison
White supremacy was developed on the notion that dark skin represents barbarianissm, irrationality, unpleasant aesthetics and inferiority. As a result of this notion, white supremacists began to impose their culture, beliefs and faiths onto the “savages”-Africans. In Robert Hayden’s literature work, Middle Passage, the reader relives the experience and thought process of a slave who is being transported from Africa to the New World. The Middle Passage is spoken in the first person by a slave whose name is not mentioned. “We had forgotten our sires’ plumed and charioted splendors, our past ivory image buried...our false god to us, our king betraying us”(Hayden 248). As the reader, we begin to understand how beliefs that were once held true to the slave, was now a fallacy. “America, where we were freed from our unspeakable misery”(Hayden 253). African beliefs and cultures became a fallacy when white supremacy positioned itself as the savior of the barbarian race. That African culture and practices were completely wrong and needs to be guided by an intelligent being-white Europeans. Thus, the emergence of self definition took effect, cutlture was stripeed away because white Europeans believed Africans had everything wrong. In the film, 12 Years A Slave, we see the same effect of targeting identity as a way to impose slavery on the main character, Solomon Northup. Solomon …show more content…
Phase 1, white supremacists falsified African culture, beliefs and identity, leaving Africans vulnerable and in search for self definition. Phase 2, validating slavery through law, and religious literature while simultaneously dehumanizing people of color. Toni Morrison book A Mercy, is narrated in the first person by Florens, a slave of Portuguese and African background. “A third of his cargo had died of ship fever. Fined five thousand pounds of tobacco by the Lord Proprietarys’ magistrate for throwing their bodies too close to the bay; forced to scoop up the corpses— those they could find (they used pikes and nets)...He’d had to pile them in two drays (six shillings), cart them out to low land where saltweed and alligators would finish the work”(Morrison