Culture is how we pass information about our world across generations. It’s why our children speak our language, it’s how they learn from us. Culture is why some humans eat with a fork, and some eat with chopsticks. Culture explains why someone standing really close while they talk to you might feel threatening to a European, but comforting to a West African. Culture defines what acceptable volumes are when speaking, and how women are expected to act in social situations.

Culture defines all of our social expectations, but also our social prejudices. Every single thing we do and say, we do and say in the context of our culture.

Now, making a culture normative — that is, it defines what is “normal” — is quite useful. The French used it well in England. Another time it was used was when West Africans were brought to this country as chattel slaves.

The society here in America needed a way to justify the enslavement of a people for no other reason than they looked a bit different. Like the Normans, they used culture to do it. Slaves were made to speak English but were forbidden to read and write. In fact, the myth was promoted that they were slow and couldn’t even be taught.

White people saw slaves as animals, apes or at best, “lesser humans.” They expected slaves to work like animals too — long, hard, and without complaint. Naturally, slaves rebelled, slowing work or feigning sickness. Blacks were seen by everyone as inherently lazy, and lazy Blacks were beaten or killed.

White people expected slaves to be subservient — a particularly useful tactic since less than a quarter of whites actually owned slaves. Slaves had to do whatever any white person told them to do. This made all whites “better” than slaves, and supportive of the system.

And there were the sexual controls. White men objectified and raped Black women at will, while promoting the myth that white women’s purity was threatened merely by the gaze of a Black man. This was particularly useful as a means to control… [Black women,] Black men and white women.

It’s Not About Race!

I come at this subject from a different history of experience and a resulting point of view but [with the exception of my bracketed and non-italicized addition] the above passage was so close to my own thinking it was thinking it was like reading a much more organized and more eloquent version of my own thoughts.