HUMAN 1C Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Orderly Departure Program, First Indochina War, Racialization
Professor Block’s Lectures
1. “Racecraft”
a. Fashioning/shaping races but also pointing out the differences to objectify them
b. Race: an ideology; came into existence at a discernible historical moment for
rationally understandable historical reasons and is subject to change
i. Race is created to have a biological meaning
1. Race meaning as non-white
c. Race (about power systems) is not:
i. Biologic: enforcing white supremacy
1. Having one drop of black blood → automatically black
ii. Objective: made up laws that were seemly made up
1. When laws determined race, some states said an African
American grandparent made someone black; others said a great
great great grandparent made someone black
iii. Trans-historic: same across historical periods
1. Different societies understand race differently
2. “Middle Passage”
a. Triangular trade: slaves from West Africa → the Caribbean and the Americas;
sugar, tobacco, cotton from the Americas → Europe; textiles and manufactured
goods from Europe to Africa
i. Movement determined by profit instead of current
b. Captives become commodities
i. Violence
ii. “Scientific” enterprise
iii. Control depletion of life: Euros can’t kill their slaves or else they’ll lose
their investment so they spend little money to keep them alive (corn that)
has little nutrition and the stones used to grind the corn made them sick
iv. Slavery is an economic process
c. When people were taken across the Atlantic, they were never heard from again
d. People enslave attempted to commit suicide; the families left behind in Africa are
affected with the absence of their loved one being taken away
e. Enslaved women are responsible for reproducing slavery (gave birth on slave
ship)
3. Ethnographic voyeurism: breastfeeding, childbirth in public
a. Ethnographic: to study cultures on their own terms
b. Voyeurism: the practice of gaining sexual pleasure from watching others
c. The way Europeans describe Africans scientifically but it’s actually for sexual
pleasure
i. Sexualized to be seen as “exotic”, depicted w/o clothes
ii. Nakedness marked them as uncivilized and “other” (WFB - barbarian girl
and Orientalism - orientals need the West)
d. Breastfeeding (sign of savagery)
i. Barbarism
ii. Narratives depict women’s bodies in an abstract way through illustrations
of breastfeeding
1. Women are sexualized through their body parts and reproduction
e. Childbirth (sign of savagery) → justifying race based slavery
i. Easy childbirth → natural, no pain, not Christian (not descendant of Adam
and Eve since Eve brought upon difficult childbirth)
1. Way to use women’s bodies as a vehicle of racecraft
ii. Europeans describe it as animal-like
4. Gender frontier: cultural encounters in frontiers where there is confrontation of
different gender systems and ideologies that challenges natural categories
a. Gender (ideals that go along with male and female); frontier (borderland b/t
settled, civilized region and the unexplored/undeveloped region but no one group
rules over the whole area)
b. European gender expectations
i. Virginity is an important value (to know for sure that woman is not
pregnant with another man’s child → inheritance issues)
ii. Only saw savagery within sexual promiscuity (naked appearances)
iii. Sees sex as a natural resource
1. Virgin land; union with men who make the land productive
2. Thomas Morton describes land as fertile and is able to gain
pleasure from farming
c. Native American sexual beliefs and practices
i. Sex wasn’t shameful, was present in art/culture
ii. Eroptic part of natural world (pueblo)
iii. Holy Sexuality: Acoma (Pishuni - deity of water) and nautsiti (body of rain)
iv. Corn Mother = Mother Earth; seeds should be buried deep in the Earth for
the rain to germinate the seeds (cosmic harmony = seeds + rain)
v. Virginity didn’t matter to Native Americans (clashing w/ Euro values)
d. Gender establishes role, behaviors, conversations, patterns of education in
society; changes over time, social construction, socially and culturally dependent
i. Contrasts within sexual characteristics by the appearances of our bodies
5. Labor practices that define and enhance racial, social and gender divisions
a. Huron Seasonal Labor Cycles
i. Women provide more diverse labor (farm work) than men (men do more
agricultural work in European culture)
b. Taxation
i. Laborers are taxed by using gender divisions; specifies Negro males and
women (defined as laborers/workers) to be taxable
6. Race-based slavery; slave status of offspring follows the mother (if the mother is a
slave, the child will be a slave)
a. An Act for Mulatto Children Being Bond of Free (1662): an enslaved woman
cannot give birth to a free child → creating generations of slaves based on race;
using women’s bodies for racial division
b. Partus Sequitur Ventrem: “to which is brought forth follows the womb”
c. Reproductive Racial Policing (1691): having a child out of wedlock and who is
Negro or Mulatto leads to the consequences of paying a fine
d. A solution for white masters to have sex with their female slaves so they would
reproduce more slaves
e. The child can be sold at any point
f. Natural increase among enslaved people in 1720s-1740s → slaves are
reproducing enough children that can replace themselves
g. Thomas Jefferson emphasized the importance of reproduction for slavery and
capitalism
7. Ideal of married life vs. reality of married life in colonial America (chastity, fidelity,
monogamy, love-based marriage vs. scarcity of women, affairs with slave women and
servants)
a. Ideals of married life
i. Wife being completely in love with husband
b. Reality of married life in colonial America
i. Chastity, Fidelity, Monogamy, Love-based marriage
Document Summary
Professor block"s lectures: racecraft , fashioning/shaping races but also pointing out the differences to objectify them, race: an ideology; came into existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally understandable historical reasons and is subject to change i. Race is created to have a biological meaning: race meaning as non-white, race (about power systems) is not: i. ii. Biologic: enforcing white supremacy: having one drop of black blood automatically black. Objective: made up laws that were seemly made up: when laws determined race, some states said an african. American grandparent made someone black; others said a great great great grandparent made someone black iii. Sexualized to be seen as exotic , depicted w/o clothes ii. i. ii. i. i. ii. iii. Nakedness marked them as uncivilized and other (wfb - barbarian girl and orientalism - orientals need the west: breastfeeding (sign of savagery)
