Such male and female slaves as you may have—it is from the nations round about you that you may acquire male and female slaves. You may also buy them from among the children of aliens resident with you, or from their families that are among you, whom they begot in your land. These shall become your property: you may keep them as a possession for your children after you, for them to inherit as property for all time. Such you may treat as slaves. But as for your Israelite brothers, no one shall rule ruthlessly over the other.32
This portentous if very human distinction between people like us and the foreign outsiders not only validated perpetual slavery but even seemed to imply that non-Hebrew slaves could be ruled ruthlessly or, as phrased elsewhere, “with rigor.” Yet Leviticus and Exodus also proclaim versions of the Golden Rule: “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers, in the land of Egypt.” Both Jews and Christians have long struggled to reconcile these oppressive and compassionate passages and precepts. (Some later captains of slave ships claimed that their treatment of Africans conformed to the Golden Rule.)33
Even when the forces of demand and supply often led to the enslavement of local debtors and abandoned babies, it was surely easier to dehumanize the foreigners captured in wars and often traded by merchants who specialized in such commerce.34 It is highly significant that beginning in the tenth century, Western Europeans began attaching a foreign ethnic connotation to their words for “slave” as they purchased increasing numbers of bondspeople from the Dalmatian coast. The Latin words servus and mancipium were gradually replaced by sclavus, meaning a “Slav” or person of Slavic descent, which became the root for the English word slave and its counterparts—schiavo in Italian, esclave in French, esclavo in Spanish, sklave in German. And from the early thirteenth to the late fifteenth century, Italian merchants participated in a booming long-distance seaborne trade that transported tens of thousands of “white” Armenian, Bulgarian, Circassian, Mingrelian, and Georgian slaves from regions around the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov to Mediterranean markets extending from Muslim Egypt and Syria to Christian Crete, Cyprus, Sicily, and eastern Spain. Such slave labor was increasingly used for the production of sugar.35 As a remnant of this white slave trade, which was cut off after the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople in 1453, there were a few Greek and Slavic slaves in Spanish Havana as late as 1600.36 But by the late 1500s, the Portuguese settlers in Brazil, having earlier relied on Indian captives, were turning almost exclusively to black African slaves, and a century later, after the “Africanization” of the Caribbean, the English colonists in Virginia and Maryland were following the same path.
Historians long engaged in a debate over whether antiblack racism preceded the widespread enslavement of Africans or emerged as a result of that enslavement. There is some truth on both sides, but in general the second alternative is supported by more evidence. It is easy enough to dwell on the negative symbolism of the “noncolor” black or even to point to a preference for dark-skinned slaves on the part of the Aryan invaders in India or the T’ang Dynasty Chinese. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the first English voyagers and traders described sub-Saharan Africans as “a people of beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion, or common wealth.” Such writers drew on earlier non-English precedents, among them the Moroccan Christian convert Leo Africanus, who in the 1520s described the blacks’ “beastly kind of life, being utterly destitute of the use of reason, of dexteritie of wit, and of all arts.” Numerous commentators noted the blacks’ near nakedness and their supposed unrestrained lust, symbolized by the male’s large penis.37 With respect to human-animal relations, it was a “tragic happenstance of nature,” as Winthrop Jordan put it, that Europeans discovered the chimpanzee, then called “orang-outang,” in the same West African regions where they purchased slaves. As a result, while it was not claimed that black Africans were themselves a species of apes, there was much comparison of their low and flat nostrils, thick lips, and other features with those of the tailless apes. There was also much continuing lore about male “orang-outangs” having sex with black women.38
But in the sixteenth century, the English were well aware that the Portuguese had long been purchasing and transporting thousands of African slaves to Iberia and the Atlantic Islands, a fact that already made them seem like a people “made to be slaves.” Moreover, the Portuguese had shown respect for African rulers and traders and had dealt with them as equals. To complicate matters further, a study of the image of black Africans in Western art suggests that medieval European culture, prior to New World slavery, can hardly be described as “racist,” at least with respect to black Africans (as opposed to Jews).39
Countless whites derived their first impressions of Africans from depictions of Mansa¯ Mu¯sa¯, the very wealthy black king of Mali, laden with gold on his pilgrimage to Mecca; or from numerous pictures of a black African magus, or wise man, in scenes of the Nativity; or from illustrations of the black Queen of Sheba or even a black Virgin Mary. While churches also portrayed black-faced executioners in the Passion of Christ, the distinctive African facial features were far more evident in the many paintings and statues of the heroic Saint Maurice, a black African clothed in armor who appeared in churches and cathedrals in Germany and Switzerland. Amazingly, Saint Maurice was supposedly a leader of the Teutonic Knights in the Holy Roman Empire’s crusade against the pagan Slavs to the east! Despite the negative depictions of West Africans in later English traveler accounts, a relative absence of antiblack racism extended on into the Renaissance and beyond, as evidenced in Western European literature and the humanistic portraits of blacks by Memling, Rubens, Hals, Rembrandt, and others.
The much earlier Muslim experience underscores the way that the increasing enslavement of blacks could lead to antiblack racism in both ideology and behavior. By 869 CE, when thousands of black slaves rose in revolt in the marshlands of the Tigris-Euphrates delta, in modern Iraq, Arabs and Persians had imported, especially by sea, countless numbers of black slaves from East Africa. And it would appear that the connection between dehumanizing labor, on the one hand, and people with a highly distinctive physical appearance, on the other, led Muslim writers in increasing numbers to describe blacks in terms that fit Aristotle’s image of natural slaves (whether they had heard of Aristotle or not). In fact, the Arabic word for slave, ’abd, came in time to mean only a black slave and, in some regions, referred to any black whether slave or free—surely an indication that black slaves were thought to have an incapacity for genuine freedom. Many Arab writers echoed the racial contempt typified by the famous fourteenth-century Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldu¯n, when he wrote that black people were “characterized by levity, excitability, and great emotionalism,” and were “as a whole submissive to slavery, because Negroes have little that is essentially human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals.”40 The historian Gernot Rotter shows that Arab and Persian writers frequently associated blacks with apes; a thirteenth-century Persian concluded that the Zanj [Bantu-speaking peoples from East Africa] differed from animals only because “their two hands are lifted above the ground,” and that “many have observed that the ape is more teachable and more intelligent than the Zanji.” 41
It should also be noted that while medieval and early-modern Arab and Persian writers usually attributed the blacks’ physical traits to climatic and environmental forces, they increasingly invoked Noah’s biblical curse of Canaan, the son of Ham, to explain why the “sons of Ham” had been blackened and degraded to the status of natural slaves as punishment for their ancestor’s sin.42 Still, there were voices like that of Muslim jurist Ahmad Baba of Timbuktu, who exclaimed that “even assuming that Ham was the ancestor of the blacks, God is too merciful to punish millions of people for the sin of a single individual.43
There can be no doubt that the increasing purchase or capture of sub-Saharan African slaves, usually for the most degrading kinds of labor,
generated an early form of racism as well as an Islamic literature defending the humanity and equality of blacks by explaining the supposed environmental origins of their physical difference.
For many medieval Arabs, as for later Europeans, the blackness of Africans suggested sin, damnation, and the devil. Despite the protests of free black writers themselves, some medieval Muslims continued to describe the Zanj as being ugly, stupid, dishonest, frivolous, lighthearted, and foul-smelling, but gifted with a sense of musical rhythm and dominated by unbridled sexual lust (again, symbolized by the large penis). Point by point, these stereotypes of medieval Muslim writers resemble those of the later Spaniards, Portuguese, English, and Americans. I should stress that many Muslim jurists and theologians continued to reject the popular idea that black Africans were designed by nature to be slaves, and insisted that human beings were divided only by faith: all infidels or pagans, regardless of skin color or ethnic origin, could lawfully be enslaved in a jihad.44
Though much further research is needed, it seems highly probable that many racial stereotypes were transmitted, along with black slavery itself (to say nothing of algebra and a knowledge of the ancient Greek classics) from Muslims to Christians as the two groups traded and fought over many centuries from the eastern Mediterranean and Holy Land on to that melting pot of religions and cultures, the Iberian Peninsula. As historian James H. Sweet has emphasized, “by the fifteenth century, many Iberian Christians had internalized the racist attitudes of the Muslims and were applying them to the increasing flow of African slaves to their part of the world.” Sweet even concludes that “Iberian racism was a necessary precondition for the system of human bondage that would develop in the Americas during the sixteenth century and beyond.” 45
Of course, preconditions do not determine the actual flow of events, and the settlement of African slaves in the New World from the early 1500s to the early 1700s was haphazard, unsystematic, and dependent on diverse local circumstances and conditions. Even in the early sixteenth century, the demand for black slaves in the Spanish colonies was tempered by what would become a universal fear that an excessive number of Africans would endanger security—a fear confirmed sporadically by slave revolts. In some regions, like the Chesapeake colonies, the status of black servants was ambiguous for a time and blacks interacted with white indentured servants until large importations of African slaves in the later 1600s generated racist laws and attitudes that reinforced a sense of a superior white identity and, eventually, white “equality.” 46
Nevertheless, the rising hemispheric demand for cheap labor, coupled with the seemingly limitless supply of slaves from Africa (well over 12 million were exported) led to the dispersal of black slaves from Chile to Canada. While the great majority were concentrated in Brazil and the Caribbean, black slaves comprised for a time more than half the populations of Lima and Mexico City, and beginning in 1688, the governor and other Canadian officials of New France begged the French kings to authorize direct shipments of African slaves to Canada, arguing that slave labor was responsible for the economic success of both New York and New England.47
As a result of this nearly universal New World demand for cheap and productive labor, the eighteenth century became the great century of the African slave trade, and the rapid growth of the New World slave population was further accelerated by the unique natural growth of the slave population in North America. Not surprisingly, given the Muslim example, these demographic events were accompanied in Western Europe as well as in the Americas by the slow and erratic evolution of an antiblack racism that went beyond any earlier precedents. The century also witnessed the evolution of a wholly new antislavery moral ideology and activism which gave an added stimulus to scientific racism, especially in the nineteenth century, as the most effective weapon to block slave emancipation.
While slavery had always involved some animalization, as a form of dehumanization, and had relied on xenophobia and ethnocentrism with respect to outsiders, it long existed without explicit racism. The ancient stereotypes of slaves, including Plato and Aristotle’s depictions of a kind of inferiority rooted in nature, had anticipated the stereotypes of blacks in much racist writing. But the scientific racism that developed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries became a systematic way of institutionalizing and justifying the individual white’s projection of an “animal Id” upon blacks. It took the form of an intellectual theory or ideology, cloaked in science, as well as actions and behavior legitimated by laws, customs, and social structure. As historian George M. Fredrickson has emphasized, racism “either directly sustains or proposes to establish a racial order, a permanent group hierarchy that is believed to reflect the laws of nature or the degrees of God.”48
The offhand racist remarks of such preeminent philosophers of the Enlightenment as David Hume, Voltaire, and Immanuel Kant, writing in the mid-eighteenth century, indicate how deeply the anti-African stereotypes from New World slavery had penetrated some of the highest levels of secular culture—the same Enlightenment culture that would make important contributions to antislavery movements. On the other hand, the Enlightenment focused attention on environmental causality and any argument for the African’s innate, genetic inferiority challenged the most fundamental and cherished Christian belief in the common origin and unity of all mankind.
Voltaire spoke of the “prodigious differences” between whites and blacks, dramatized not only by the latter’s “round eyes, their flat noses, their lips, which are always thick, their differently shaped ears, the wool on their head,” but by “the measure even of their intelligence.” Kant agreed that the “substantial” difference between the two races “appears to be as great in respect to the faculties of the mind as in color,” and that therefore “the Negroes of Africa have received from nature no intelligence that rises above the foolish.” Hume suspected that blacks were “naturally inferior to the whites” since they had produced “no ingenious manufactures … no arts, no sciences.” And Kant noted that Hume “invites anyone to quote a single example of a Negro who has exhibited talents.” In short, given the Enlightenment’s broader context of promoting freedom and equality to replace traditional feudal hierarchies, some intellectual leaders discovered a race that, because supposedly lacking a rational mind and dominated by animal passions, exhibited an incapacity for genuine freedom and thus presented a serious problem when living in a white society. Yet it should be stressed that Hume, Voltaire, and Kant were by no means defenders of slavery.49
This seeming paradox is mirrored in the phenomenon of the Enlightenment’s encouragement of science and secular thinking, which led to an increasing recognition of the close ties between humans and other animals and to the classification of human groups in the manner of classifying plants and animals. Ultimately this methodology contributed to various forms of scientific racism and to the view that black Africans were closer to apes than whites, or were even a separate species with a separate origin.
The great Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus and German zoologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach led the way in devising extremely influential classifications of the human species within the primate genus.50 Thus Blumenbach affirmed the essential unity of the human species while differentiating Caucasians, Mongolians, Ethiopians, American Indians, and Malays. The last four groups had supposedly diverged or degenerated from the original form set by the Caucasians, who were named for the supposed beauty of the people living in the mountainous region between the Black and Caspian seas (a curious point considering the long enslavement of such so-called Slavs). While Linnaeus and Blumenbach did not rank human races, and Blumenbach tried to refute the common claim that Africans were “nearer the apes than other men,” the great French naturalist Georges-Louis de Buffon found an environmental explanation for the Africans’ intellectual inferiority as well as skin color.51
By 1799, Charles White, a British surgeon and member of the Royal Society, drew on comparative anatomy in his account of nature’s Great Chain of Being
—the belief in a continuous gradation from plants and animals to human beings, an idea long debated in the eighteenth century. While disavowing any support for “the pernicious practice of enslaving mankind,” White assembled an unprecedented array of physiological details to prove that “ascending the line of gradation” between separate human species, the white European was the “most removed from brute creation” and “the most beautiful of the human race.” Refuting the Judeo-Christian doctrine of a common human origin, he affirmed that Negro sensuality and intellectual inferiority rested on the evidence that the African more closely resembled the ape and “seems to approach nearer to the brute creation than any other of the human species.” While contrary to White’s stated intentions, this attempted scientific animalization of the black African contributed to proslavery theories of “inherent inferiority,” one of two ways of finding Aristotle’s natural slave.52
But, given the strength of Christian opposition, it would not be until the 1840s, partly in response to the flourishing abolitionist movements in Britain and the United States, that the racist behavior long embodied in all examples of New World slavery would be intellectually structured in a widely accepted science, later greatly aided by neo-Darwinism, that would flourish well after emancipation and persist with little effective criticism until after the First World War. Yet Aristotle himself had pointed to an alternative source of natural slavery when he compared the natural slave with domesticated animals, who in the course of being “trained” had internalized human needs and desires.
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Page 5
