Helen Nader: A Literary Analysis

Superior Essays
History scholars Helen Nader, author of “Desperate men, Questionable Acts: The Moral Dilemma of Italian Merchants in the Spanish Slave Trade,” and Amanda Kay McVety, author of “The 1903 Skinner Mission: Images of Ethiopia in the Progressive Ear,” use two different themes in order to describe the superiority feelings of groups of people toward other inferior parties. However, these two scholars conduct this analysis during time periods that over four centuries apart. Nader employs the moral dilemma surrounding slavery of Christopher Columbus and the Spanish Monarchy as a way to describe their superiority perceptions toward Native Americans. McVety uses a specific example, the Skinner Mission to Ethiopia, in order to demonstrate the superiority …show more content…
Nader explains the intricacies of the complicated morality clash in the Spanish Empire between the monarchy, King Fernando and Queen Isabel, and ambitious explorers, most notably Christopher Columbus. Nader writes, “In Malaga, Fernando and Isabel acted well within the norms of their moral community…. The enslaved people were non-Christians captured in a just war.” She continues later in her article, “Fernando and Isabel, in their response to Columbus’s enslavement of the Indians, were not trying to stop sop slavery, but they were determined not to allow their own people to be enslaved.” The central theme that Nader is addressing is that Fernando and Isabel were not revolution when their morals caused them to oppose Columbus’ enslavement of Indians. She also is pointing out that the Spanish monarchy offered no moral resistance to the thought and enterprise of slavery, only that some people – their subject – should not be enslaved. What pairs this evidence from Nader with McVety’s is the overarching theme of supremacy. In Nader’s case, she argues that the Spanish view themselves as superior to all other peoples. Whether those people were Jews or Muslims, who Fernando and Isabel have no problems enslaving, or the Native Americans, who if not slaves were dutiful subjects of the …show more content…
Nader concludes, “For while we believe that it is immoral to enslave Native Americans, just as Fernando and Isabel did five hundred years ago, something very important has changed; we now believe that it is immoral to enslave any human being, regardless of their religion or civilization.” While articulating the how human morals have enlarged to encompass all people, Nader is also declaring that superiority feelings have changed over time. They are becoming less existent through the realization that enslaving any human being is immoral. McVety closes with, “American responses to Ethiopia in victory and in defeat provide powerful examples of deep-rooted racial hierarchies and continual efforts to combat them. When white Americans reached out to Ethiopia in 1903 they were looking for customers in an interest anomaly. In 1935, they did not reach out at all, resigning themselves to seeing the Italian invasion as the inevitable expansion of white civilization across the African continent.” McVety’s closing contrasts with Nader’s to some extent. McVety does not end on the high note of the end of superiority feelings that Nader’s article ends on. Instead, she argues that the perceptions of an inferior race held true for decades. When Ethiopia was able to defend itself against Italy at first, it broke the racial norms; but when it eventually fell to

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