Journal #6: Race and Culture

            The main characters in the stories Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs and “The Quadroon” by Lydia Maria Child both suffer from not being fully white. In The Life of a Slave Girl the main character Linda was a daughter of a well known black carpenter and so didn’t realize she was a slave until she was six years old. Also, she wasn’t fully black, she was what they called back then “Mulatteos”. “In complexion my parents were a light shade of brownish yellow and were termed mulattoes” But that did not have any difference she was still a slave. The problem of race and culture is more prevalent in the story or “The Quadroon”. The story starts out explaining how a little girl named Xarifa, comes to be. The mother who is a black woman falls in love with a white man and they marry, but not legally. The have a little girl together, whom they name Xarifa. So Xarifa is half black half white and her skin is an almost golden brown and deemed really beautiful, but she still isn’t accepted by the “white world” After bother her mother and father die she is sold into slavery were she becomes really depressed and is eventually killed by her owner.

            Both of these stories are really sad in that both Linda and Xarifa where white in part, but were still sold into slavery and not treated as equals. They were still treated as lowly as regular whole blacks were. Reading these stories I realized how bad it was back then. Now a days we just kind of shrug off the whole slavery thing and not really think it was a big deal, but it was. People who had even 1 past relative who was black, if people knew about it, then you would be old into slavery because you weren’t as good as whole whites and that’s just wrong. Obviously they just wanted to fit in and I know that all people should be treated equally, but if we are going off what the morals of the whites were back then, then at least the people with some white blood in them should be treated better.