Less Than Human
Page 13
The principle of equating slaves with domestic animals was upheld by the Romans, who enshrined it in law. The Lex Aquilia statute of the third century BCE stated, “If anyone shall have unlawfully killed a male or female slave belonging to another or a four-footed animal, whatever may be the highest value of that in that year, so much money is he to be condemned to give to the owner.” Centuries later, the jurist Gaius commented that under Lex Aquilia slaves were legally equivalent to domesticated animals, and Varro wrote in the late 30s BCE that some divide “the means by which the land is tilled” into two parts, namely “men and those aids to men without which they cannot cultivate.” Included in the latter category are “the class of instruments which is articulate, the inarticulate, and the mute; the articulate comprising the slaves, the inarticulate comprising the cattle, and the mute comprising the vehicles.”22 Later, in the early centuries of the Islamic empire, slaves were collectively referred to as “heads” (ru’us raqiq)—as in “heads of cattle”—and slave traders were called “cattle dealers” (nakhkhs).23
A thousand years afterward little had changed, as is evidenced by Frederick Douglass’s account of how, as an eleven-year-old boy, he and other slaves were treated as livestock in the estate of their diseased master.
I was immediately sent for, to be valued with the other property. Here again my feelings rose up in detestation of slavery. I had now a new conception of my degraded condition.… We were all ranked together at the valuation. Men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine. There were horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being, and were all subjected to the same narrow examination. Silvery-headed age and sprightly youth, maids and matrons, had to undergo the same indelicate inspection.24
DEHUMANIZATION IN BLACK AND WHITE
This man born in degradation, the stranger brought by slavery into our midst, is hardly recognized as sharing the common features of humanity. His face appears to us hideous, his intelligence limited, and his tastes low; we almost take him for some being intermediate between man and beast.
—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA 25
It is sometimes claimed that racism is a modern European invention, no more than a few centuries old, and that it played no role in premodern and nonWestern forms of slavery. Neither of these views is correct. Although premodern and non-Western people did not deploy the same racial constructs as those that continue to haunt us today, the essence of racism—the notion that whole populations possess an irredeemably defective character—has been part of human culture for a very long time. It is exemplified by the Greek attitude toward barbarians, and the attitude of the ancient Chinese toward the frontier tribes surrounding them. The ancient Egyptians explicitly distinguished between four races: the Libyans, Nubians, Egyptians, and Semitic inhabitants of Palestine and Syria (the latter were especially despised, and frequently disparaged as “wretched Asiatics”) and they distinguished between these groups in part by the color of their skin. The famous Roman physician Galen specifically claimed that black people have defective brains, which make them unintelligent, a claim that was repeated by the famous tenth-century Muslim writer al-Ma’sūdī.26
Racism is distinct from slavery, although the two often intersect. In most slaveholding societies, both masters and slaves belong to the same ethnic group, but in about 20 percent of slaveholding societies’ masters and slaves are divided along racial or ethnic lines. Patterson remarks that, given these facts, the claim that American slavery was uniquely racialized “betrays an appalling ignorance of the comparative data on slave societies,” and he takes issue with Frank Snowden’s frequently repeated claim that there was no prejudice against black people in the Greco-Roman world.27
Discrimination against and oppression of black people is the form of racism most familiar to Western readers, who typically think of the transatlantic slave trade in this connection. However, racial discrimination against sub-Saharan Africans, and their dehumanization, has a much longer history. Prejudice against blacks seems to extend back to the earliest days of Islam, for Muhammad reportedly found it necessary to insist in his final sermon that “No Arab has any priority over a non-Arab, and no white over a black except in righteousness,” and not long after, the black poet Subhaym, a slave who died in 660, complained that “the lord has marred me with blackness.” There is clear evidence that, by the Middle Ages if not before, derogatory attitudes had tipped over into dehumanization. The well-known eleventh century Arab writer Sa’adi al-Andalusi, a judge in Islamic Spain, held that “the rabble of Bujja, the savages of Ghana, [and] the scum of Zanj,” all of whom were sub-Saharan African peoples, “diverge from [the] … human order,” and three centuries later, the great Tunisian scholar Ibn Khaldun informed his readers “the Negro nations … have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals.”28
Although the Arabs kept white as well as black slaves (the word slave comes from Slav, because many Arab slaves were Slavic people), the derogatory stereotypes associated with black people centuries later in the United States were already prevalent in medieval Islamic culture. Sub-Saharan Africans were seen as stupid, oversexed, lazy, dishonorable, coarse, and dirty. Ibn Butlan, an eleventh-century Christian physician from Syria who specialized in detecting concealed physical defects of slaves on behalf of potential purchasers, expressed the then current stereotype in his handbook for slave buyers when he described Zanj (East African) women in the following terms: “the blacker they are the uglier their faces.… there is no pleasure to be got from them, because of the smell of their armpits and the coarseness of their bodies.” It is important to note that the contempt in which Arabs held many of their southern neighbors was not always attributed specifically to their color. Abyssinian and Nubian slave girls were highly prized by wealthy Arabs.29
The prevalence of these attitudes should come as no surprise. Although the form of slavery practiced by the Arabs was, on the whole, less cruel and degrading than its later American counterpart, it was nevertheless brutal and demeaning, as is evidenced by the fact that caravans that transported captive men and women across the Sahara to the Muslim kingdoms to the north were even more lethal than the densely packed ships that carried Africans across the Middle Passage to the Americas (Patterson notes that the mortality rate en route was between 3 and 7 percentage points greater than that of the transatlantic trade). It is difficult to treat humans so inhumanely while continuing to acknowledge their humanity.30
Now, let’s consider the American experience. The transatlantic slave trade was pioneered in the fifteenth century by the Portuguese and Spanish, and gradually adopted by the British and others to supply labor for their burgeoning colonies. The ethnic prejudices that made the trade possible found support in scholarly speculations about Africans’ rank on the great chain of being. Men of letters such as the physician Sir Richard Blackmore deployed the full weight of academic authority to support the claim that black Africans supplied the missing link between human beings and chimpanzees.
As Man, who approaches nearest to the lowest Class of Celestial Spirits … so the Ape or Monkey, which bears the greatest Similitude to Man, is the next Order of Animals below him. Nor is the Disagreement between the basest Individuals of our Species and the Ape or Monkey so great, but that the latter were endow’d with the Faculty of Speech, they might perhaps as justly claim the Rank and Dignity of the Human Race, as the savage Hottentot or stupid Native of Nova Zembla.31
Although Blackmore stopped just short of describing Africans as nonhuman creatures, others were less restrained. Slave owners and merchants had a vested interest in the subhuman status of Africans, for if Africans were lower animals, then it was right and proper to treat them as such.
Much of what we know about the dehumanization of slaves in the North American colonies comes from the writings of a missionary named Morgan Godwyn. Born in England in 1640, he followed in his father’s footst
eps and became an Anglican minister. In 1666, he made his way to Virginia, and then to Barbados to act as a clergyman to all-white parishioners. At the time, planters in both British Caribbean and North American colonies didn’t allow slaves to be baptized or receive religious instruction. On Barbados, only a few Quakers took an interest in the slaves’ spiritual well-being. Although Godwyn was strongly opposed to Quakerism, he was deeply influenced by the Quakers’ commitment to social justice, and this determined the future course of his religious and literary career.
Godwyn was determined to bring the gospel to the oppressed peoples of the New World. After years of conflict with plantation owners on Barbados, he returned briefly to England, and then embarked on a ship bound for Virginia, where he launched a relentless literary campaign. Godwyn’s central charge was that slaveholders justified their treatment of Africans on the grounds that they had no souls, and therefore were not human. The colonists, he averred, held a “disingenuous position” that “the Negros, though in their Figure they carry some resemblances of Manhood, yet are indeed no men” and advocated “Hellish Principles … that Negros are Creatures Destitute of Souls, to be ranked among Brute Beasts and treated accordingly.”32
Godwyn was not exaggerating. In 1727, ten thousand copies of an address by the Bishop of London (a huge number for that era) were distributed to colonists, in which he beseeched colonists to consider Africans “not merely as slaves and on the same level with neighboring beasts, but as men slaves and women slaves, who have the same frame and faculties with yourselves, and souls capable of being made happy, and reason and understanding to receive instructions to it.” The Irish philosopher and clergyman George Berkeley, who visited Rhode Island in 1730, en route to an ill-fated attempt to establish a university for colonists and Native Americans on Bermuda, complained to members of a New England missionary society that “our first planters” had “an irrational Contempt of the Blacks, as Creatures of another Species, who [had] no Right to be admitted to the Sacraments.” Somewhat later, in the 1741 trial for a black man accused of plotting a slave uprising in New York, the prosecuting attorney proclaimed that most blacks were “degenerated and debased below the Dignity of Human Species … the Beasts of the People,” while another assured his readers that “the Negroes … are the most stupid beastly race of animals in human shape” and proposed a taxonomy of five types of Africans consisting of “1st Negroes, 2d, Orang Outangs, 3d, Apes, 4d, Baboons, and 5th, Monkeys.”33
It seems incredible that educated and cultivated men could believe that it was literally true that, unlike whites, black people did not have souls. Even Winthrop Jordan, an eminent authority on slavery in early America, expressed incredulity. He wrote, “American colonialists no more thought that Negroes were beasts; if they had really thought so they would have sternly punished miscegenation for what it would have been—buggery.” And yet, “the charge that white men treated Negroes as beasts was entirely justified if not taken literally.”34
Jordan’s comments reflect a simplistic view of the psychology of dehumanization. Did the colonists really believe that black people were subhuman? It all depends on what you mean by “believe.” The word belief covers a great deal of territory. Sometimes, we use it to refer to statements that we mouth to ourselves and to others, but which have no impact on how we live our lives. Belief in God often falls into this category. There are people—I think, many people—who claim to believe in the Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim, or…) God, but whose behavior remains unaffected by their professed convictions (they conduct their lives in ways that are indistinguishable from unbelievers). In such cases, it seems reasonable to say that they don’t really believe in God, because real beliefs guide behavior. We can say of such people that although they don’t really believe in God, they nevertheless believe that they believe in him. Likewise, incredible as it may sound, there are people who profess to believe that the material world is an illusion—that it is “all in the mind” (the philosopher George Berkeley, whom we met earlier in the present chapter, was a famous exponent of this position). But threaten to pour a cup of hot coffee in such a person’s lap, and he or she will take defensive action, just like anyone else would. People like this believe that the material world is perfectly real—but they falsely believe that they don’t believe it.35
Bearing these points in mind, it would be an error to take slaveholders’ statements about Africans at face value. Actions really do speak louder than words, and words shouldn’t be trusted unless they’re backed up by behavior. If you want to know what people believe, look at what they do.
Many colonists both treated slaves as less than human and also explicitly stated that Africans were soulless animals. They justified their position on religious grounds. Some asserted that black people were not the progeny of Adam and Eve, but were descendants of creatures that were created before the first humans or were formed from debris left by the great flood (the same reasoning that was used to impugn the humanity of American Indians). Another, highly influential line of biblical exegesis drew on the account of Noah’s curse on the descendants of Ham described in Chapter Nine of the book of Genesis. In this story, Noah planted a vineyard, used the grapes to brew his own wine, and became so inebriated that he passed out in his tent. Noah’s son Ham entered the tent, and saw Noah sprawled out nude in a drunken stupor. He informed his two brothers, Shem and Japheth, who walked backward into the tent (to avoid laying eyes on their naked father) and covered him up. The scripture records that when Noah came to, he “knew what his younger son had done unto him” and cursed Ham’s son Canaan, saying “a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.”36 If the punishment seems rather stiff for such a minor offense, notice the curious turn of phrase: Noah “knew what his younger son had done to him.” What exactly had Ham done? According to some rabbinical commentators, the reference to Ham’s “seeing” his father was a euphemism for raping or castrating him, which would explain why Noah was so miffed. Whatever the explanation, for centuries, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars held that the name Ham was derived from a Hebrew word meaning “black” and “hot,” and this was taken to imply that Ham’s descendants were black people from a hot place (sub-Saharan Africa), and that therefore (so the shaky inference runs) black Africans are destined for enslavement (in fact, the etymology of Ham remains mysterious, but it is almost certainly not derived from the Hebrew for “black” and “hot”). This ancient exegetical tradition found a distant echo in “son of Ham shows”—popular carnival attractions in which white men paid for the pleasure of hurling baseballs at the head of a black man.37
American colonists added a new wrinkle to the “son of Ham” theory. They argued that Noah’s curse condemned Ham’s descendants to subhumanity. “Because they are Black,” wrote Godwyn, “therefore they are Cham’s Seed; and for this [reason] under the Curse, and therefore no longer Men, but a kind of Brutes.”38 Godwyn dismissed these biblical justifications as absurd, and insisted that there is no reason to think of Africans as anything less than fully human. “Godwyn’s proofs were largely commonsensical,” writes Columbia University historian Alden T. Vaughan. “Africans, he pointed out, obviously have human shape and appearance; and although they are of a darker complexion than the English and most other Europeans, so are five-sixths of the world’s people.”
Even if one were to grant (as he did not) that blackness was a deformity, Godwyn insisted that it was no more a sign of bestiality than was any mental or physical abnormality; people with dark pigmentation can reproduce themselves, in fact they often reproduce with whites—a sure sign of their humanity. Godwyn’s position on color preferences was also refreshingly even-handed for a seventeenth-century Englishman. There is no universal standard of beauty, Godwyn reminded his readers: blacks favor their own color just as whites do, and if a subjective objection to skin colors were allowed to consign some people to the category of brutes, fair-skinned Europeans might someday find themselves so labeled. Moreover, after a few gene
rations in hot climates, Goldwyn argued … even the English “become quite Black, at least very Duskie and Brown.” Are they to be considered brutes rather than men?39
Godwyn drove his point home by arguing that the slaveholders’ own practices tacitly acknowledged the human stature of black people. He noted that some slaves were placed in positions of considerable responsibility (for instance, as overseers of other slaves), but “it would certainly be a pretty kind of Comical Frenzie to employ cattel about business, and to constitute them Lieutenants, Overseers, and Governours,” and also noted that the fact that white men used slave women for their own sexual gratification would make them guilty of bestiality if slaves were really just livestock.
The dehumanization of African Americans did not end with the creation of the new nation in 1776, or with the abolition of slavery in 1865. Books and pamphlets published during the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continued to assert that they were beasts. During the nineteenth century the new discipline of anthropology gave this racist ideology a veneer of scientific credibility. Some, like the British surgeon Sir William Lawrence, the Harvard geologist Louis Agassiz, and the Philadelphia physician Samuel George Morton were polygenecists—people who believed that each race had evolved independently of the others—and therefore that black people were a separate species (“That the negro is more like a monkey than a European,” wrote Lawrence, “cannot be denied as a general observation”). The German anthropologist Theodor Waitz vividly described the confluence of the polygenecist mindset with exterminationist policy. Writing in 1863 of those who regard the so-called “lower” races as subhuman creatures, he remarked: