On Tue, 14 Jul 2020, Martin Gregorie wrote:
I notice that the abstract you quoted has no references earlier than 1962, so I find it hard to take it seriously, especially as the earlier religious links between 'black' and 'sin' appear to be ignored by it. This is odd considering how much influence religion had on society in the 17th century and that there was no slavery in North America before about 1640.
That last bit is plain wrong. Jamestown had Africans as slaves as early as 1619, but the Spanish were even earlier, having brought slaves on an expedition to present-day South Carolina in 1526 (slaves who then rebelled and essentially destroyed the settlement's ability to survive). https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/misguided-focus-1619-beginning-slavery-us-damages-our-understanding-american-history-180964873/ As for the influence of religion at this time, surely you're aware of Biblical defenses of racism and slavery, whether in the form of the "curse of Ham" or the suggestion that slavery was a necessary evil because it would control the sinful, less humane, black race. Furthermore, even if "black" and "sin" are linked prior to the use of black as racist, this does not diminish the reality that "white" racist views of "black" people are long-standing. And, as pure conjecture, if European Christians associated black with sin and evil, it's not much of a leap to suggest these associations suggested or strengthened their racist views of black people as lazy (Sloth), capricious (Greed) and lustful (Lust), among other negative qualities.
Out of pure curiosity, when was the current racist use of 'black' first coined and where did that happen?
While there are earlier uses of the term "black" referring to darker-skinned people, it most directly comes to us via the European Enlightment, and it was racist from the start. The quick version is that various "natural philosophers" in the late 1600s tried to describe and account for the different "races" that they encountered in the world. One famous account is from François Bernier, entitled "New Division of the Earth by the Different Species or 'Races' of Man that Inhabit It." https://web.archive.org/web/20060524134126/http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/bindon/ant275/reader/bernier.PDF Bernier doesn't explicitly classify these groups into color in this piece, but he does say " if a black African pair be transported to a cold country, their children are just as black, and so are all their descendants until they come to marry with white women." Additionally, he describes their hair as "not properly hair, but rather a species of wool, which comes near the hairs of some of our dogs". Just an example of how the "other" is not proper, but rather is animalistic. For explicit connection between race and color, as well as clear expressions of white racial superiority, we have Carl Linnaeus to thank. In the first edition of Systema Naturae, from 1735, he classififed humans into four subgroups or "varieties" of human species (later expanded to five), and by the 1758 version these were specifically associated with color: White (Europeanus), Yellow (Asiaticus), Black (Africanus), and Red (Americanus). https://www.nature.com/articles/447028a To say his descriptions of these "species" feels oddly familiar in our modern world would be an understatement: Africanus is desribed as "black, phlegmatic, relaxed; black, frizzled hair; silky skin, flat nose, tumid lips; females without shame; mammary glands give milk abundantly; crafty, sly, lazy, cunning, lustful, careless; anoints himself with grease; and governed by caprice." Europeanus, on the other hand, is described as "white, sanguine, browny; with abundant, long hair; blue eyes; gentle, acute, inventive; covered with close vestments; and governed by laws." These are the beginnings of scientific racism, and while it's mostly rejected these days, it still has modern proponents. Wikipedia has a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism Another interesting scientific debate that reveals racism in the European Enlightenment (and the history of science, lest we think of it and it's cousin technology somehow innocent of racism)) is monogenism vs polygenism and the theory of degeneration that the monogenists posited to explain the differences in race and ethinicity. The jist of it is that "white" people reflect the "normal" state of man, and other races have degenerated based on environmental and climate differences around the world. Moved to a more temperate climate, Georges-Louis Buffon suggested, a black person from Senegal would eventually return to his "normal" white, blonde and blue-eyed state. Clearly wrong, but also clearly racist. And it wasn't some fringe belief. The likes of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, while dissagreeing with Buffon that someone could return to "normal" just by moving to a different climate, agreed that "the Negroes, and in general all the other species of men [are] naturally inferior to the whites" (Hume) or that "the Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling" https://books.google.com/books?id=eem1AQAAQBAJ&pg=PA9&lpg=PA9#v=onepage&q&f=false -- Public key #7BBC68D9 at | Shane Williams http://pgp.mit.edu/ | System Admin - UT CompSci =----------------------------------+------------------------------- All syllogisms contain three lines | sha...@shanew.net Therefore this is not a syllogism | www.ischool.utexas.edu/~shanew
