The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (7 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

As Aristotle contemplated the social stratifications of his time, he concluded that “from the hour of their birth, some men are marked out for subjection, others for rule.” Notably, his analysis of human inequalities begins by stressing the parallel between slaves and domesticated beasts:

Aristotle then goes on to claim that nature “must have intended” to give slaves stronger bodies and feebler minds than free people: