African American History (Paper)

Odin Waters

The British were active participants in the Atlantic Slave Trade, but they weren't the first Europeans to enslave Indigenous inhabitants from West Africa and transport them to their colonies in the Western Hemisphere. Those distinctions go to the Spanish and Portuguese, respectively. According to the historical record, on January 22, 1510, King Ferdinand of Spain authorized a shipment of 50 enslaved West Africans to Hispaniola in the Caribbean, thus initiating the system of chattel slavery that would continue for nearly five centuries. Following that trajectory, the Portuguese transported over four million African captives to Brazil. Whether those events were motivated by racist predispositions or are indicative of the earliest traces of racism is a topic of ongoing debate.

The racial categories that emerged in the European colonies around the world, including British North America, are quite current in the expanse of human perception and socialization. As Ashley Montagu states in Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, "The racial interpretation is a modern "discovery." The objection to any people on racial or biological grounds is virtually a purely modern innovation" (Montagu 59). Scholars have yet to find any evidence of racist beliefs existing in any nation prior to the conquest of the Americas. "A study of both ancient and recent cultures and literatures shows us that the conception that there are natural or biological races of humankind that differ from one another mentally as well as physically is an idea that was not developed until the latter part of the eighteenth century" (Montagu 57).

Some historians have postulated that the concept of race as an applicable designation of a fixed and contained heritage has its origins in economic enterprises that were backed by religious institutions for the benefit of ruling European and Euro-American elites. In the sugar, rice and tobacco growing regions of the West, the demand for slave labor was insatiable. The Indigenous communities proved difficult to control since they were familiar with the terrain and could retreat into the surrounding wilderness. In other areas, "indentured Europeans fell short of the demand for labor" (Painter 33). The labor shortage was resolved by the importation of millions of enslaved Africans that were often worked to death on plantations throughout the hemisphere. As a means of endorsing the horrific conditions of non-Europeans subjugated within thriving cash crop economies, religious doctrines were introduced to rationalize the appalling fate of countless dark-skinned people. Though it goes without saying that not all Christian Europeans approved of or condoned the savage treatment of Africans or Native Americans, the religious ideologies purported by the advocates of profitable slave-based operations were highly influential. They resolved that slavery was, "designed to bring the pagan and the infidel into the arms of the Church. The justification of slavery then takes the form of the imposition of vassalage upon the savage for the good of his soul. The modern form of race prejudice is in direct line of descent from this medieval Christian concept of the relation of Christians to their inferiors" (Montagu 58). Theological explanations for the continuous abduction and sale of Africans were disseminated throughout Europe and the Americas, for example, "The belief in the predestination of blacks to slavery was so prevalent in the eighteenth century in France that the Jesuit missionary, Charlevoix, declared in his Histoire du Paraguay in 1756 that "slavery was the means used by God for the salvation of the Negro" (Christophe 185).

Far from losing its validity as a system of classification, the concept of "Race" would be altered and modified into pseudo-scientific theories that were quickly accepted by European colonizers and their descendants as legitimate proof of a predetermined pecking order that placed them at the top tier of an imposed power structure. The term itself dates back to 1749 when Comte de Buffon, "introduced the word "race," in its zoological connotation, into the scientific literature" (Montagu 68). Buffon did not create the word for the purpose of establishing a rigid hierarchy of human divisions; it was used to, "provide an account of all the varieties of man known to him in a purely descriptive manner" (Montagu 69). Regardless of his intentions, "he must be held at least partially responsible for the diffusion of the idea of a natural separation of the races of humankind, though he himself does not appear to have had such an idea in mind" (Montagu 69). Biology as a field of natural science did not arise until the 19^th century. Before then, any allusions to inherent disparities between ethnic groups were described in terms of "blood." Hence, we find writings like those of Cesar de l'Escale de Verone in 1790 who, "writing on the Blacks of the French colonies, warned against the infusion "into the very heart of our country of that thick, heavy, impure, black, crafty blood so unworthy of that which flows in your veins, the reason of which has covered the whole earth and eclipsed all that was ever acquired by the Greeks and Romans" (Montagu 70). It was in that period that the seeds were planted for the cultivation of distorted views in every facet of academic studies during the 1800s when, "hardly more than a handful of scientific voices were raised against the notion of a hierarchy of races. Anthropology, biology, psychology, medicine, and sociology became instruments for the "proof" of the inferiority of various races as compared to the white race" (Montagu 80).

The greatest implication disproving the credibility of race theories is that all research data concerning racial variances were merely based on physical traits and, "Such physical traits were soon linked with cultural and social differences, educability, and intelligence" (Montagu 285). Today race is no longer an acceptable premise, instead it is acknowledged as a social construct that does not meet contemporary standards of scientific verification. In that regard, it seems that we are revisiting the customs of early civilizations that hadn't conceived of the separatist notions of racial prejudice as reflected in a play by Terrence, who had been a slave in the Roman era, "I am man: nothing human is alien to me" (Montagu 57).

Work Cited

Christophe, Marc A. "Changing Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century French Literature." Phylon, vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 183-189.

Montagu, Ashley. Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. Sage Publications, 1997.

Painter, Nell Irvin. Creating Black Americans: African-American History and its Meanings, 1619 to the Present. Oxford University Press, 2007.

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