June 2nd, 2011 Race and "Some could suckle over their shoulders."

Today we discussed for a long period about race, what defines race other than just color, some of the examples included social construct, physical appearance, culture, religion, ect. We had some discuss their opinions about what race is and that it runs deeper than we may realize, it may run down to the Tower of Babel in the Bible where tribes were broken up with the languages and were spread across the world. Race to me has to do with many different topics and we can probably never pinpoint one thing that makes a race what it is, races have different cultures, languages, religions or practices, some races may have similar practices or similar features but are different people. I don't think there's a way to know or distinguish what a true deep meaning of race is, it is all judged by appearances and actions and given a name, I think it's important that all people are ok with who they are and not be looked down upon or even up upon for whatever reason.

Gender was a big part of our discussion as well, June 1647, Richard Ligon in his recordings describes an African American woman that he has seen for the first time, she was different from what he was use to seeing before, white women of Europe wore dresses, were modest and well brought up, the woman he saw had little clothing and was a worker in the fields which was unusual to him. I think many Europeans thought the cultures and practices of African Americans and Native Americans were taken wrongly as they felt to tell them what they were doing was wrong, if they worshiped totems or their own gods, had ear and nose piercing or did not wear clothing like the Europeans did. It caused a lot of controversy which in turn caused a lot of conflict as the writers of Europe at the time described them and beasts and gave descriptions that were sometimes exaggerated, the readers didn't know what was in the New World as they had never traveled there, the only thing they had to go on was what they read.