During the start of unit 2 we learned three words that involve the manipulation and oppression people. Marginalize, which means to make someone feel less important or put off to the side. Power which means to have control over the events & behaviors over people. Exploit which means to take unfair advantage of someone for your own benefit. People with power due to stronger weaponry are able to conquer others. The oppressed people are forced to slave away and build their homes and work their farms for a pay of a few cents that is simply taken away due to the taxes set by their master’s.
To start off, people with power marginalize and exploit others because they use the wealth and authority they accumulated to force them into labor.To support my claim i’ll summarize document 3, it was about how even though the spanish technically considered them free citizens and paid the natives to work in there fields, they were still enslaved. The document is a quote from a book titled “Colonial America” written by Jerome R. Reich in 1994. To prove my claim correct i’ll provide a quote from document 3, “Although the Spanish government always insisted that Native Americans were free citizens who must be treated humanely, in practice they were bought and sold, worked (literally) to death, and forced into virtual slavery.”. Isn’t it odd that even though the Natives were “free citizens” and yet, they was treated and worked as they were still slaves? The Natives were still taken advantage of and exploited despite being “free citizens” and since they were bought and sold, the Spanish obviously didn’t think they were too important to them, or in other words the Spanish marginalized the Natives.
Additionally, slaves were forced to change religions, exploiting the slaves weak minds. The document I used to write/type my answer was document #4 which went over a couple of rules that was made to punish slaves for different reasons. Document #4 is a few rules from the “code noir”, a collective of rules made to keep slaves in check, it was written by the king of France on March, 1685. A quote from document #4 states “the slave who will have struck his master or the wife of his master, his mistress or their children to bring blood, or in the face, will be punished with death.”. This demonstrates how people with power marginalize and exploit people of different identities because these rules were made to instill fear into the minds of slaves exploiting the slaves weak minds, and to create and instill laws where the punishment is death, shows how slave masters marginalized there slaves lives. In conclusion people with power are able to marginalize and exploit people with different identities because the French instilled fear and treated their lives like they weren’t worth more then the crops they tended to.
To add on to, a 7th document states that the Aztecs performed a traditional ritual that involves sacrificing the man they chose to represent the god Tezcatlipoca. There’s not a lot of information on this document but what I do know is that it was a article made sometime from the 1490’s – 1500’s, the name of the Aztec scribe is unknown however. Those with power in the document are the Aztec people turning a man into a human god, to represent Tezcatlipoca. Aztecs also marginalized and exploit people through power lavishing there chosen human with gifts and women,only to kill him in the end but in order to do so they’d need to exploit his ignorance,ego and greed. This is an example of a social system due to the fact that people who grew close to him manipulated him.