Fri, 24 Apr 1998 10:52:16 -0500
From: R R.

Subject: Reaction to 1778 Encyclopedia Britannica entries
To: Global

     The entry that we read from the Encyclopedia from the 1700's really surprised me. It's really amazing how different their perspective was from ours now. It described, in great detail, what they thought the Africans were like. It said things about their appearance, . . .    This shows that they viewed Africans in a very negative way. They also mentioned that as one traveled east, the features became more "regular." The word REGULAR is very ethnocentric because it is assumes body features could get "more regular." This was sort of comparing Africans in a bad way to Europeans. This article is written with a very bias view. It seems that the authors, Europeans, considered themselves the standard. I can't believe that this is written in a factual encyclopedia. People read this for information and were misled. It makes me wonder how factual our encyclopedias are. Maybe some of the info we read is not entirely true. I'm sure that we are more accurate than they were a few centuries ago, but maybe we haven't come as far along as we think.

R. R.

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