Saturday, June 14, 2014

What is a specific example of a case where ethnicity is used as a commodity?

The most prominent example of an ethnicity being used as a commodity is the Transatlantic Slave Trade in North America. While slavery itself was not exclusively rooted in white supremacist views regarding the African race, American and European slave traders perceived Africans as secondary citizens or sub-human. In the slave trade, the African slaves were viewed as commodities that contributed to the agrarian economies of the South and even parts of the Union. Slavery objectified the human body as a machine that was put to work on plantations or in the houses of plantation owners, thus dehumanizing the slaves.
On the other hand, in modern-day human trafficking, white women are seen as higher value commodities in prostitution rings. In Asia and the Middle East, white female escorts have a higher hourly rate than their local peers. This is due to the fact that wealthy local clients prefer white women, because they are seen as exotic.
https://journals.sagepub.com/action/cookieAbsent

https://www.bu.edu/afam/files/2016/03/Shelby-Walton-Slave-Commodification.pdf

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