“The contradictions surrounding the role of white woman in the frontier of Jamaican creole culture also participated in these performative systems. By the mid eighteenth century, to put it crudely, white women were at a premium”
This quote is incredibly important to the rest of the passage do the way it describes the role of white woman in Jamaican society along with how they were portrayed. The were put upon a pedestal above law and custom, quite simply the held a very comfortable place in society and this directly relates back to the fact that the Jamaican people were greatly taken advantage of and this is where they derived their comfortable position in society. The one thing that separated white and black women on the island was race and yet they believed that black women were voracious in a multitude of ways.White women were idealized and seen as fragile a direct contradiction the view of black women which many believed to be a “inner nature” directly relating them to animals in a sense.Despite all the time that has passed black people as a whole were still seen as almost entirely different from white people. Even if black women were to have children with a white man they were still to be slaves and this was directly do to the women social standing, it was extremely regressive and this was the nature of the island. Racial tropes and stigmas were carried throughout the island with slavery and the many divisions of what kind of white people there were. Therefore there was a very clear and evident difference in the status of the woman in Jamaican society based on the tone of their skin.
