"Pieter de Marees announced in 1602, for instance: 'the women here are of a cruder nature and stronger posture than the Females in our lands in Europe.'" p. 12

The masculinization of African/black women began even around the 16th and 17th century. Its' effects still reverberate in many of our American systems today (i.e. black women and pregnancy---Serena Williams popular example).

"...they [African women] have no need of midwives, doctors, nurses and I have known [African] women go to bed over night, bring forth a child and be abroad the next day by noon." p. 12

The same type of attitude is still held on to today and brings irreputable harm to black women in medicine more broadly as well as during pregnancy. In the present we have appointed officials such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who even repeats extraordinarily similar rhetoric.

"Still, the women 'were excellent,' possessed of a 'beauty no Painter can express.' p. 12

The clarification should be 'no white European painter could express' because the complexions and bodies of Africans were incongruent with the complexions and forms of bodies they would have been familiar with.

It reminds me that many of the subjects and items we interact with today always use someone (or a specific group of people) as the basis of the design or insights (i.e. how medicine identifies acceptable levels of pain-tolerance often on the basis of fairer complexions or how facial recognition tends to be more accurate with fairer complexions over darker ones); these are intentional and a result of who is used as the example or placeholder for medicine, technologies and so on.