What you feel is what you are, and what you are is beautiful

I liked both prompts...so I wanted to address both of them!

Lopez would consider Cuvier’s scientific and essentialist findings as rather preposterous. Cuvier demonstrated that he believed that the bodies of black women were all similar in the sense that their genitals were larger and their brains smaller than that of the average white person. Lopez, on the other hand recognizes that there is not biological basis for race. He writes that, “Race is not a determinant or a residue of some other social phenomenon, but rather stands on its own as an amalgamation of competing societal forces” (56). I find this to be a very insightful statement. I interpret the article about Sarah Baartman to be saying that she was treated like a circus freak because of her black skin and dominant features that made her biologically “different” from white people. Cuvier would beg to differ; he says that “Greater genetic variation exists within the populations typically labeled Black and White than between these populations” (54), basically stating that there is a better chance that two black people will look more different biologically than a white and a black person in comparison. Cuvier’s exploitation and misunderstanding of Sarah’s biology would be frowned upon by Lopez, who would argue that no two humans are built exactly the same. Granted, a lot has changed since 1652, but Lopez would consider Cuvier’s assumptions to be petty and primitive.

When I read Horace Miner’s account of the Nacirema’s rituals, I was a little shocked at some of their procedures. They definitely value the health and beauty of the body, and will do anything to keep out evil energies and prolong their lives. The writer makes it sound very grotesque and “wrong” to an extent, but when you think about it, what kinds of things to we do to our bodies to keep away our own “evils”? We tan because pale is unattractive. We whiten our teeth and get braces because no one likes a janky mouth. We buy the nicest clothes and celebrate commercial holidays because we feel like we have to in order to fit in and be a part of the community. The Nacirema’s rituals are different, yes, but that does not mean that they are bad. Ethnocentrism occurs for everyone at one point or another because WE always think that WE do it better, and that our ritual or belief is normal compared to everyone else. It is like Cuvier thinking that Sarah Baartman was a freak because of her features. She could have thought HE looked like a freak because he was different from her. It is the dominant cultures who decide what is normal, but it is the smaller cultures that stay true to themselves. Lopez says, ““Races are constructed relationally, against one another, rather than in isolation” (56). Races don’t just pop up out of nowhere; we all come from a similar origin, but it is our branches that add diversity and color to the world and its cultures. Without different rituals, we would all be the same; we would have no one to learn about or study, which is what life is all about. We learn from the day that we’re born and continue until our dying day. This quote from the Nacirema article says it all, “Looking from far and above, from our high places of safety in the developed civilization, it is easy to see all the crudity and irrelevance of magic. But without its power and guidance early man could not have mastered hispractical difficulties as he has done, nor could man have advanced to the higher stages of civilization” (4). They know that their ideas are outdated and different, but this statement says that we all start learning somewhere; we cannot forget our roots. We are still learning every single day about who we are and where we come from, which helps us to build a better tomorrow. You just have to think: Will people look back in 100 years and see our lifestyles as primitive and crude?