Polarised traits like cleanliness are imposed to mark slaves as nearer to animals

Evidence

Features such as cleanliness may also reflect such polarising construction; Booker T.Washington in Up from Slavery (1967) relates how the exaggerated and genteel cleanliness of the slave-owners’ establishments served to mark them off from the ‘animal-like’ slaves, whose enforced filthiness (they were provided with no means to wash) served the joint function of marking and justifying their condition, and of linking them to animals. Thus the slave’s being is part of a lower order in which other linked inferiors also have their being—the slave is body, the slave is animal, the male slave is feminised. — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 206

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The enforced-filthiness example gives concrete historical texture to the cleanliness/dirt opposition underpinning ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ social-marking readings.
• XREF: Directly parallels the reason/nature and human/animal chains Plumwood uses to link sexism to the domination of nature — core to the ecofeminism course pairing with Merchant. — connects to: Wartime compensation petitions itemized enslaved people like livestock — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 79; Placing humans in the animal kingdom enabled scientific racism justifying slavery and conquest.; Slave inventories listed human beings with dollar valuations alongside livestock. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots: My Fight with Harvard…, 357

Broader Connections

• Placing humans in the animal kingdom enabled scientific racism justifying slavery and conquest. #expands (0.80)
• Wartime compensation petitions itemized enslaved people like livestock #corroborates (0.72) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 79
• Slave inventories listed human beings with dollar valuations alongside livestock. #corroborates (0.72) — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 357