journal entry
Javonda Weeks
April 20, 2015
The event that most interested me was the slave trader video. How they took a prince and broke him. He still was able to survive and still run a plantation just like the tribe he was from. It must take a lot of self will to survive in the conditions they were put in on the boat, then to get off and still be no better than cattle. Though slavery was equally as tragic and traumatic for black men and women, the experience of slavery affected them in different ways. "Depending upon their age and gender, slaves were assigned a particular task, or tasks, that had to be completed during the course of the day." In certain settings, men would participate in the hard labor, such as working on the farm, while women would generally work in the household. They would "be sent out on errands, but in most cases their jobs required that they spend much of their time within their owner's household." These gender distinctions were mainly applied in the Northern colonies and on larger plantations. In Southern colonies and smaller farms, however, women and men typically engaged in the same roles, both working in the tobacco crop fields. Although slave women and men in some areas performed the same type of day-to-day work, women were in constant fear of being assaulted by their slave owners. "The female slave...was faced with the prospect of being forced into sexual relationships for the purpose of reproduction." This reproduction would either be forced between one African slave and another, or between the slave woman and the owner. Slave owners saw slave women in terms of prospective fertility. That way, the number of slaves on a plantation could multiply without having to purchase another African. Unlike the patriarchal society of white Anglo-American colonists, "slave families" were more matriarchal in practice. "Masters believed that slave mothers, like white women, had a natural bond with their children that therefore it was their
April 20, 2015
The event that most interested me was the slave trader video. How they took a prince and broke him. He still was able to survive and still run a plantation just like the tribe he was from. It must take a lot of self will to survive in the conditions they were put in on the boat, then to get off and still be no better than cattle. Though slavery was equally as tragic and traumatic for black men and women, the experience of slavery affected them in different ways. "Depending upon their age and gender, slaves were assigned a particular task, or tasks, that had to be completed during the course of the day." In certain settings, men would participate in the hard labor, such as working on the farm, while women would generally work in the household. They would "be sent out on errands, but in most cases their jobs required that they spend much of their time within their owner's household." These gender distinctions were mainly applied in the Northern colonies and on larger plantations. In Southern colonies and smaller farms, however, women and men typically engaged in the same roles, both working in the tobacco crop fields. Although slave women and men in some areas performed the same type of day-to-day work, women were in constant fear of being assaulted by their slave owners. "The female slave...was faced with the prospect of being forced into sexual relationships for the purpose of reproduction." This reproduction would either be forced between one African slave and another, or between the slave woman and the owner. Slave owners saw slave women in terms of prospective fertility. That way, the number of slaves on a plantation could multiply without having to purchase another African. Unlike the patriarchal society of white Anglo-American colonists, "slave families" were more matriarchal in practice. "Masters believed that slave mothers, like white women, had a natural bond with their children that therefore it was their