The Undivided Past (29 page)

Between the fall of Rome and the early
Enlightenment, the color-blind legacy of pagan antiquity, combined with the Christian belief in a shared humanity embodied in the doctrine of monogenesis, stood as a powerful barrier to the rise of racial thinking,
categories, hierarchies, and conflict. Indeed, races later to be reviled in the West were honored. One of the wise men who presented their gifts to the infant Christ was usually depicted as being dark-skinned; early Christians celebrated the conversion of Africans as evidence of the spiritual equality of all human beings; and during the late
Middle Ages, a favorable image of
blacks was expressed in the idea of “le bon Nègre.”
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Black was beautiful, and race-blind behavior expressed race-blind attitudes. To be sure, some black Africans were forcibly brought to Europe or shipped to America, but others traveled freely as ambassadors and pilgrims, or collaborated with Europeans in the slave trade itself. This was not the only way in which
slavery remained race-blind: for more than a millennium, from the Vikings to the Ottomans, the trade in slaves was overwhelmingly in
white
people, from eastern Europe and Asia. As such, it was geography, not race, that determined who was a slave; this was equally true in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in America, where marriages between colonizers and indigenes were commonplace.
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But there were also countervailing developments, and it was in medieval times that racial stereotypes and displays of hostility first became conspicuous. In late antiquity, Africans were popularly deemed to be descended from Canaan via Ham, and since Canaan had dishonored
his
father, Noah, their descendants were cursed and condemned to be dark-skinned and servile, as the hewers of wood and the drawers of water. Notions of “purity of blood” (notably in the Iberian world as “limpieza de sangre”) became widespread on a continent thought to be under siege by
Islam. Among those deemed to lack such purity and to be accomplices of the devil were the
Jews. A thousand years of religious objection had hardened into a racial animus, as the Jews came to be seen as a people apart, who could be neither converted nor assimilated into a broader humanity; and such discriminatory thinking also seemed to furnish divine sanction for employing
black Africans as
slaves.
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The result was that there were many violent outbursts against Jews, ranging from attacks by
Crusaders in the Holy Land from 1096 to their expulsion from
Spain four hundred years later; and from the mid-fifteenth century, the Portuguese began to enslave black Africans, shipping some back to work in Europe, and transporting others across the Atlantic to labor in their American empire. Such were the beginnings of European racial attitudes and
categories, which would persist into the twentieth century, establishing by reason of blood or skin the inferiority of all other peoples to white
Christian Europeans.
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Yet for every tendency toward a modern conception of race, there was an
equal and opposite tendency to undercut it, which prevented race from emerging as a central organizing concept of Western intellectual life, a major component of
political culture, or a significant means of structuring human identities and differences before the middle of the eighteenth century.
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By then, however, racial categories, rankings, and identities
were
becoming more sharp, fixed, and significant, and there were a number of explanations for this development. It was partly a manifestation of the neoclassical sensibility of the
Enlightenment, deriving from ancient
Greece and Rome, which demonstrated an exclusive preference for white-skinned people. It was partly a consequence of the increasing travel and encounters between Europeans and
peoples in Africa and South Asia, whose existence (and appearance) the biblical story of
monogenesis and the curse of Canaan did not necessarily explain. There was also the expanding Atlantic
slave trade, in which by now many European
nations were participating, and which established and institutionalized the connection between freedom, superiority, and whiteness on the one hand, and servitude, inferiority, and blackness on the other. By the second half of the eighteenth century, these racial taxonomies were also becoming more pronounced on America’s eastern seaboard and in the
Caribbean, where the slave-owning societies and slave-labor
economies placed whites over blacks in binary opposition.
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The view that the peoples of the world were divided by the categories and identities of race may seem to run counter to the rational currents of Enlightenment thought, but it was fairly common among Enlightenment thinkers. In 1753,
David Hume observed that “the negroes” were now regarded as being “naturally inferior to the whites,” and
Immanuel Kant made the same point twenty years later, in
The Different Races of Mankind:
“whites and negroes,” he argued, “are not two different kinds of species, but nevertheless two different races.”
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Here was a significant (and unintended?) consequence of the European Enlightenment, whose leading lights had sought to overthrow and supersede religion, belief, and superstition and replace them with reason, observation, and science. But in undermining (and often ridiculing) the tenets of established religion, Enlightenment thought also challenged the basic, time-hallowed Christian doctrines of monogenesis and common humanity. Experience and observation seemed rather to ratify the notion that there were many different peoples inhabiting the globe, who belonged to diverse races, and whose forebears may have originated at different times and in different parts of the world. Hence the new doctrine of polygenesis, embraced in
Britain and
France, the Caribbean, and the United States by such rationalists as
Lord Kames and
Voltaire.
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This lent support to what was seen as the unbridgeable division between peoples who were black and those who were white: “for monogenists, race could be considered chance variations; for polygenists, differences were bound to be absolute.”
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This was not the only way in which the Enlightenment led to an intensification of racial thought and divisions, for if the peoples of the globe had originated in separate parts of it, and were immutably different from one another, then it should be possible to assign them distinctive natures and separate identities and to rank them according to their collective sophistication, or lack thereof. The Swedish botanist
Carolus Linnaeus, celebrated for pioneering modern taxonomy, is also often credited with inaugurating this practice, when in 1735 he divided and ordered humankind into four distinct races: white European, red American, dark Asiatic, and black negro. Although he did not explicitly rank them, Linnaeus’s description of the races clearly indicated his preferences: he describes Europeans as “acute, inventive…[and] governed by laws,” whereas the
Africans were “crafty, indolent, negligent…[and] governed by caprice.”
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Meanwhile, Linnaeus’s contemporary, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de
Buffon, preferred a sixfold classification: Lapp polar, Tartar, South Asian, European, Ethiopian, and American, but he likewise assumed that Europeans were intellectually superior to the others, especially Africans, whom he dismissed as “simple and stupid.”
²⁵
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s
On the Natural Variety of Mankind
, published in 1775, and twice revised, eventually concluded that there were five races: Caucasian—a term he coined to indicate a superior racial lineage unique to the inhabitants of central and western Europe—along with lesser groupings he described as Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay.
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At a time of such pervasive racial language, identities, and hierarchies, the contradiction went generally unremarked when Britain’s American colonists rebelled and established a
nation dedicated to “the proposition that all men are created equal,” but excluded from this declaration the fifth of its people who were black African slaves. “What then,” asked
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur at just this time, “is the American, this new man?” His answer was clear: “a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans and Swedes.… He is either a European or a descendant of a European.”
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This view of the new nation’s racial hierarchy was affirmed by
Thomas Jefferson, who insisted that “the difference” between blacks and whites was “fixed in nature,”
and not susceptible to alteration or adjustment.
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Accordingly, when the U.S. Congress passed the
Naturalization Act of 1790, it restricted American citizenship to those superior specimens of humanity described as “free white persons,” and this legislation would remain in force for the next eighty years. (In the
Dred Scott
decision of 1857, Chief Justice
Roger B. Taney would later uphold this understanding and assert that blacks could not be American citizens because they “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” and were debarred by their race from being part of the American “political family,” which remained restricted to whites.)
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The establishment of racial attitudes, identities, and rankings across the Western world during the second half of the eighteenth century was reinforced by the growth in a range of pseudoacademic endeavors later described as “
scientific racism.” During the 1770s,
Peter Camper of the Netherlands and
Johann Kaspar Lavater of Switzerland suggested that human beings could be racially classified and ranked on the basis of the varied dimensions, differing angles, and volumetric capacities of their skulls; thus was inaugurated the new field of
craniometry, which soon became popular across Europe and the United States.
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The result was the proliferation of publications purporting to demonstrate that the foreheads of negroes receded more than those of whites, and that their cranial capacity was thus significantly smaller, suggesting their
brains were too, which could only mean they were less intelligent—conclusive proof that blacks belonged to a different and inferior race. Craniometry flourished into the early decades of the nineteenth century, and these years also witnessed the heyday of the cognate discipline of
phrenology, whose practitioners made even more systematic attempts to correlate mental capacity with the contours of the skull, though reaching the same conclusion that white people possessed larger brains and greater intelligence than black people.
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Here was seemingly irrefutable evidence that distinct races
did
exist, and that they could be separated and ranked in permanent hierarchies.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, racial categories, rankings, and identities became increasingly important in Western thought, politics, and culture, and practitioners of
subjects as varied as linguistics, anthropology, ethnography, philology,
biology,
phrenology, and
craniometry were preoccupied with observing, measuring, ordering, and explaining what they believed were these all-pervasive racial types.
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Yet for all this apparent certainty and objectivity, and notwithstanding the belief that “
race was everything,” it was (like class, only more so) a concept and category on which agreement proved to be impossible.
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There was no consensus as to whether the origins (and thus the races) of humankind could be better explained in terms of
monogenesis or polygenesis. From the late eighteenth century, the general trend in informed thought was away from the former and toward the latter, but neither
Linnaeus nor
Buffon nor
Blumenbach believed in polygenesis. This confusion about how (and where) humanity began also meant there was no agreement as to the precise number of races.
³⁴
Were there two, namely white and black, which subsumed all the others (as
Jefferson and
Kant believed)? Or were there three (
Gobineau), or four (Linnaeus), or five (Blumenbach) or six (Buffon), or were there many more (as
Knox thought)? Were such racial characteristics as skin color, the size of the skull, or the angle of the forehead the result of biology (in which case they could not be changed), or had they evolved in response to the environment in keeping with the new insights of
Darwin (in which case perhaps they might be)? Should races be classified by such physical features, or by their mental attainments and cultural attributes, or both?
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By now there was also uncertainty as to whether races were separate and distinct, or intermingled and interbred, thereby hybridizing and melding imperceptibly into one another. The reality in the
Caribbean and the Spanish Americas was that the “white” and “black” races regularly intermarried, which meant people of mixed race—variously called mestizos or half-breeds—were widespread. Between 1776 and 1789,
Médéric Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry produced a detailed survey of the nuances of race and elaborate gradations of color to be found in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (later Haiti), which cast doubt on the view that the world was divided between “pure” whites and “pure” blacks, and even some of the early pioneers of racial taxonomies, such as Johann Blumenbach, accepted that their limited number of
specified races were no more than ideal types, and that in practice there was a human continuum, as the races merged one into another by insensible degrees.
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This was enough to move the likes of
Gobineau, the American slaveholder
Josiah Nott, and Professor
James Reddie of Edinburgh University to condemn race-mixing and miscegenation as a “filthy” practice; they noted that such mongrel peoples were “doomed to perish,” going the way of the ancient Egyptians and the Carthaginians. And there were some, like Knox’s protégé
James Hunt, who believed the state had an obligation to enforce racial separateness and purity by passing restrictive laws to “regulate the intermixture of the races of man.”
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