(One in a series of posts on George Fredrickson’s 2002 book, Racism: A Short History.)
If, as French historian Léon Poliakov wrote (and Fredrickson cites), “For the organization of Christianity it was essential that the Jews be a criminally guilty people” (p. 18), and that fundamental anti-Judaism laid the groundwork for the rise of antisemitism, then the same is not true for white-over-black racism. Quite the contrary.
The first convert to Christianity recorded in the New Testament (Acts 8:27 ff.) was an Ethiopian. The late medieval myth of Prester John, a non-European Christian monarch who would join European Christians in the struggle against Islam, located the king in Ethiopia. Nativity scenes represented one of the three Magi (Gaspar) as a black man. Black saints—like Gregory the Moor—were venerated. There’s even the surprising case of St. Maurice who “quite suddenly turned black—at least in the Germanic lands“. (p. 28) While medieval European culture tended to associate “blackness with evil and death and whiteness with goodness and purity”, Fredrickson argues this can be exaggerated, asking rhetorically, “If black always had unfavorable connotations, why did many orders of priests and nuns wear black instead of white or some other color?” (p. 26)
Fredrickson traces the beginnings of European antiblack racism to the Iberian peninsula in the late Middle Ages, before the rise of modern Spain and while the Muslim Kingdom of Granada still controlled much of the Mediterranean coast:
“In southern Iberia the most conspicuous slaves of light-skinned or tawny Moorish masters were black Africans, and it was natural for Christians, as well as Muslims, to begin to associate sub-Saharan African ancestry with lifetime servitude. When Portuguese navigators acquired slaves of their own as a result of their voyages along the Guinea Coast in the mid- to late fifteenth century and offered them for sale in the port cities of Christian Iberia, the identification of black skins with servile status was complete.” (p. 29)
All of this happened roughly at the same time Europeans stopped enslaving one another. Increasingly the European economy was based on ownership of property (especially land). By contrast, the African economy was based non-ownership of land and ownership of people. As the Portuguese pushed further south along the west African coast throughout the 1400s, they found a vigorous local slave trade already in existence. Fredrickson concludes, “…the initial purchase and transport of African slaves by Europeans could easily be justified in terms of religious and legal status without recourse to an explicit racism“. (p. 31)
crossposted at: masscommons.wordpress.com
