Americas vs America

The Difference Really Matters

I used to be so staunch about how in English, we have to stop saying that we live in one America. A lot of people from Spanish-speaking countries have expressed their annoyance that we in the United States like to call ourselves Americans. I often think to myself, that's a bit of Spanish – centrism! Back when they were the colonies of Spain, called new Spain or new Granada and stuff, the United States had decided to fight a war for independence. We had created a new identity that was not one of our colonizers. And because we did it first, everybody's still mad. Except for the Brazilians. In Brazil, where they speak Spanish, not Portuguese, people from the United States are known as Americans.

Our main language here is English, and within the English language, there are. But then I was watching Bridgerton and they talked about how they're going to the Americas.

It sounded so strange! I don't think people actually talked like that in the past! And they certainly don't talk like that now!

We see the female protagonist of season four looking at what I thought was a map of the Caribbean. Usually, people tell you where they're going-- the Caribbean or South America or North America or Canada or something. (Although, I do recall many Italians embarking on boats for “America” only to end up in Buenos Aires.) Why wouldn't she say that she's going to the Caribbean?

Slavery.

The very reason why the Bridgertons and the other aristocrats are so wealthy is because of the free work of laborers in the Caribbean and in North America. Landed aristocrats made their money off of the trade in sugar, rum, people, cotton, textiles, tobacco, and a slew of other natural resources that were converted into products before the Industrial Revolution. Shondaland does not want us to discuss how the enslavement of Africans and their descendants throughout the Americas created wealthy Europeans. 

This is the thing that bugs the hell out of me as I'm watching Bridgerton! These people are wealthy because of slavery! SLAVERY. 

All those landed aristocrats owned that land because they had spent over a century turning communal land into private property. This forced working class and poor people into consistent wage labor positions in a market based system in which they worked, you guessed it, for those rich aristocrats. Of course people worked other types of jobs including making products for the home and selling them to others. We are witnessing the beginnings of capitalism in Bridgerton. However, the labor that makes the lives of the Bridgertons and their aristocratic friends possible is often obscured or hidden altogether. We see all the people working in the kitchens and doing the household labor, but we don't know why they are doing all of the labor. I have not seen a single character on the show receive a paycheck in all of the seasons!

Household staff in Bridgerton season 4

But all of that is hidden behind these sexy love scenes and beautiful dresses to be worn at balls with odd dance steps involving random hopping.

All of those millions of enslaved people were hidden on the other side of the Atlantic. They were working for free in North America and the Caribbean, making it easier to not see the atrocities of enslavement that people throughout Europe, but especially in Bridgerton, are very much tied to. Where did they get the sugar for their tea? Where do they get their tea? Who is Picking the cotton for the cloth Of their beautifully designed clothing?

We are supposed to look past this terrible history of enslavement, appropriation of indigenous lands, and colonization and turn Bridgerton into a cute show about a diverse Britain that has a lot more Black people than I would've expected. (It's so weird! Like, shouldn't there be a lot more South Asians there?) but I am totally here for it anyways because I love seeing the work of Black people shine! I also love the idea of a Black American woman randomly deciding to take a book and do whatever she wants to do because she has no Fs to give.

That does not mean I don't have a lot of questions. For example, wouldn't Queen Charlotte have a German accent? Shouldn't there be more Europeans there? They don't have any French enemies that they can talk smack to? I'm just surprised that there are not more foreigners from other parts of Europe in Bridgerton, hanging out in England, as landed to aristocrats who have no plans of returning to their homeland of origin or interfering with white people. There are so many white people and so few black or brown people or Asians?