Black History Series
The Concept of Race
As the paradigm of racial supremacy became entrenched during the 19th and 20th centuries, it became unthinkable to some historians that Blacks in America, Africa, or elsewhere were capable, in any historical period, of intellectual or cultural expression beyond the simplest and most childlike achievements.
The classification of humans by race is a relatively recent innovation in human history. The concept became useful shortly after the advent of the Euro-African slave trade.
European spice shipments from India and the Far East were disrupted in 1441 when the Muslims conquered Constantinople and shut down established land and sea routes from Europe to the orient. This seemingly innocuous disruption of commerce brought about two important changes in the current of human history: it ushered in the age of European exploration, discovery, and colonization, and it moved the maritime nations of Europe toward the mass enslavement of Africans. Portuguese sailors had quickly set out to find a safe passage to India around Africa. Though ostensibly seeking pepper, nutmeg and cinnamon, the Portuguese found the black-skinned people of Western Africa potential items of trade and became the first nation to import Africans by force into Europe. Rudimentary guns and cannons gave the Europeans a decided advantage in this human trade. Spain and Portugal engaged in a heated rivalry to seize and sell Africans and to get the blessings of the Pope in doing so. The Vatican obliged by issuing a series of papal bulls endorsing the capture and enslavement of Africans on grounds that they were pagans. In 1442 Pope Eugenia IV gave absolution to seamen engaged in the forced importation of Africans and in 1452 Pope Nicholas V gave King Alphonso of Spain general powers to enslave “pagans.” These papal decrees set Africans apart and gave Holy sanction to the enslavement of Africans and to the impending defamation of the Black race.
It was during this era of colonization and exploration that Europeans first began to take note of those differences among people that became attributed to race. It is thought that the first European to systematically classify the peoples of the earth into racial groups was the French traveler Bernier (1625-1688). He put human beings into the following categories:
1. Inhabitants of Europe, North Africa, and parts of Asia.
2. Africans, whom he described as having “thick lips, flat nose, black skin, scanty beard, woolly hair.”
3. Asiatics had “broad shoulders, flat face, small squab nose, little pig’s eyes deep set, and three hairs of beard.”
4. Lapps were “little stunted creatures, with thick legs, large shoulders, short neck, face elongated immensely, very ugly, and partaking very much of the bear.”[1]
Early American Racial Philosophy
Long before the American Revolution, the enslavement of Africans had become rooted into the fabric of the American economy, and Americans had formed a racial philosophy unique to themselves. In a speech in 1712, William Lynch told slave-owners in Virginia how to train female Africans so that they willingly break their male children for generation upon generation:
In her natural uncivilized state [the female nigger] would have a strong dependency on the uncivilized nigger male, and she would have a limited protective tendency toward her independent male offspring and would raise the female offspring to be dependent like her. Nature has provided for this type of imbalance. We reverse nature by burning and pulling one civilized nigger apart and bull whipping the other to the point of death—all in her presence. By her being left alone, unprotected, with the male image destroyed, the ordeal caused her to move from her psychological dependent state to a frozen independent state. In the frozen psychological state of independence she will raise her male and female offspring in reversed roles. For fear of the young male’s life, she will psychologically train him to be mentally weak and dependent but physically strong.[2]
Thomas Jefferson strongly disapproved of slavery and wrote, “All men are created equal,” yet in his “Notes on Virginia” in 1786 he offered the opinion that the Negro in America is condemned by nature to an inferior status. He stated that they were ugly and had a strong and disagreeable odor, then went on to say, “In memory they are equal to whites; in reason much inferior,” and “in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” [in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous] He concluded, “The blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to whites in the endowment both of body and of mind.”[3]
Such attitudes in the United States grew from American contact with a body of people whom it had been made a crime to educate. From reduced opinions of enslaved Africans, Americans speculated whether all humans were part of the same species or whether separate species of genus Homo existed, of which Blacks were a distinct and inferior example. This theory of the polygenic origin of the races supplied the South with an excellent defense of slavery. It was argued that Blacks were not really human and consequently need not be extended the rights of humans.
Opposing views were suppressed. In the late 18th century a Frenchman by the name of Count Constantine de Volney (1757-1820) wrote a book, The Ruins of Empires, that described his journeys in Egypt between 1783 and 1785. The book was so well received in Europe that an American version was printed in the mid 1790’s. Volney described the appearance of the Sphinx as “typically Negro in all its features,” and went on to applaud the race of men that built it:
There are a people, now forgotten, who discovered, while others were yet barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men, now ejected from society for their sable skin and frizzled hair, founded on the study of the laws of nature, those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe.[4]
In deference to American insistence on the inferiority of the Black race, British editors omitted these references from the American edition of Volney’s book.
Racism and Science
In 1871 in The Descent of Man, Darwin concluded that, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world.” This idea gave rise to Social Darwinism. Darwinism, by inferring a natural process in the disappearance of the so-called lower races, made the prospect of their extinction, their elimination as a source of contamination to the white race, seem to be a necessity of evolution rather than a barbarity of white racism.[5] Such were the attitudes toward race following the American Civil War when slavery in the United States was made unlawful.
Sir Francis Galton, who was England’s leading Darwinian scientist in 1883, launched a new inquiry into heredity called eugenics, which brought much attention to the work of Gregor Mendel (1822-1884). Mendel’s work demonstrated that certain biological characteristics can be transmitted from one generation to another. The eugenics movement was intent on bringing about human improvement through genetic control using such techniques as involuntary castration if need be.
The 1884 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica reflected contemporary British and American opinion when it stated that the Negro “occupies the lowest position in the evolutionary scale, thus affording the best material for the comparative study of the highest anthropoids and the human species.” The American Negro of the late 19th and early 20th century, as evidenced in this quote, was characterized as being outside the human species.
Innovative Racial Theories
Madison Grant in The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916, argued that the Nordic race was far superior to any other race and was the one on which the nation had to depend for “leadership, courage, loyalty, self-sacrifice and devotion to an ideal.”[6] Grant alerted Americans to the danger of the immigration of large, poor families from Southern and Eastern Europe. The eugenicists felt that the assimilation of these degenerate breeding stocks would erode civilization.
The United States Immigration Act of 1921 was therefore set up under a quota system that limited the number of European immigrants to 3 percent of the immigrants from their country of origin who lived in the United States in 1910. The law was changed in 1924 to 2 percent of the immigrants in the United States in 1890, a change that favored the older immigrant stocks, such as the English, Irish, German, and Scandinavian, over the Southern and Eastern Europeans, who were newer immigrants.
Count de Gobineau of France, who has been labeled the “father of modern racism,” originated the most compelling theory of racial differences to be embraced in Europe and provided Europeans with an eloquent theoretical justification for their prejudices. Gobineau rejected the idea of a brotherhood of man, which he saw as a vain and empty dream based on a fallacious belief in the equality of man. He recognized three races: the white, the black, and the yellow. He ascribed to the white race an energetic intelligence, perseverance in the face of great obstacles, great physical strength, and a natural tendency for political organization and stability. He believed that the Aryan branch of the white race was the highest form of human being and was supposedly found in the greatest abundance among the Germans. Gobineau’s racial hierarchy put the Black people at the bottom. They were said to be marked by an animal nature, a severely limited intellect, and instability of mood, but they possessed great energy, will power, and sensuality. Gobineau claimed that Blacks were immoral, with little concern for their own life or the lives of others. The yellow race was purported to be superior to the Blacks, but was apathetic, lacked physical strength, and was uncreative but law abiding.
The Englishman Housten Chamberlain expanded on Gobineau’s theory, concluding that: “Physically and mentally the Aryans surpass all other men; therefore they are by right the masters of the world.”[7] Chamberlain came to detest everything British and renounced his British citizenship to become a citizen of Germany. The Germans alone, he believed, had “the uncompromising character, the sense of absolute justice, the impelling will to triumph over all circumstances.” Chamberlain’s contribution to racist thinking was the view that the Germans represent the supreme race that has contributed practically everything of significance to human progress. The Germans, in his view, have a right not only to dominate the universe but also to maintain racial purity. It was this theory that set Adolph Hitler and the Germans onto a course of world conquest leading to the Second World War and leading to the extermination of millions of Jews.
Gobineau describes Northern Europeans as the highest evolved form of human being, and he ignores that the roots of modern man and the roots of his culture lie far from Europe and neandertalensis. Indeed, none of modern man’s earliest archaeological precursors have been found in Europe. No australopithecines, no Ramapithecus, and no primates from earlier epochs have been found there, and “considering how intensively the prehistory of Europe has been explored,” states anthropologist Adamson E. Hoebel, “it is not likely that one ever will be.”[8]
Kinks in the Aryan Armor
Those who support Aryan supremacy often elevate the Aryan image by denigrating other racial groups. The eugenicists, for example, categorize the peoples of Southern and Eastern Europe as degenerate breeding stocks. They forget that much of what is memorable in Western Civilization had its origin in those very regions. The early city-states of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley are on the eastern fringe of Europe in modern-day Iraq. The ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome are in Southern Europe. Finally, the great Renaissance that snatched Europe from the declivity of the Dark Ages had its origin in Italy, a nation the Eugenicists disparage.
As the paradigm of racial supremacy became entrenched during the 19th and 20th centuries, it became unthinkable to some historians that Blacks in America, Africa, or elsewhere were capable, in any historical period, of intellectual or cultural expression beyond the simplest and most childlike achievements. The denigration of Africa had become so complete by that time that even American Blacks, some of whom still operated under the psychological dependencies instilled under the William Lynch philosophy, were convinced that nothing of note has ever been achieved on the continent of Africa. This denigration became credible because Aryan historians had effectively disassociated the Nile Valley from the Continent of Africa.
Aryan-influenced history books neglect to explain that when the pyramids were being built in Africa two thousand years before Christ, all of the territory they claim as their strongholds, all of Northern and Western Europe (Germany, The Netherlands, England, etal.) subsisted under primitive tribal cultures. Even in Southern Europe at that time, Athens was populated by little more than Stone Age nomads, and Romulus and Remus, founders of the city that would spawn the Roman Empire, had not yet begun to suckle on wolves.
Following World War One, Aryan influence was so strong in the United States of America that it allowed the Ku Klux Klan to become the most powerful political force in the Southern United States as well as in parts of the Northern United States. Aryan bigotry by that time denigrated peoples of every race and every country including European Whites who lived outside Aryan strongholds and Nordic Whites who chose to cling to Catholicism. Everyone outside the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant faction was disparaged as being of an inferior breed. At the same time Blacks in America were being virtually re-enslaved under Jim Crow laws. The image of Africans at this time was that of a simple, merciless cannibal obsessed with stewing missionaries in massive iron kettles.
Paralyzed by this paradigm, convinced that there would be nothing of interest to discover in Africa, major universities had done little archaeological research along the Nile River south of the first cataract before interest in the region peaked early in the 20th century. Plans were being made to build the Aswan High Dam, a project that would inundate a vast stretch of ancient Nubia within the floodplains that would become Lake Nassar. Intensive excavations in Nubia over a period of twenty years by an international team of archaeologists uncovered incredible evidence of ancient cultures long forgotten.
In 1909 American Egyptologists George Reisner, curator of the Boston Museum and a pioneer in the archaeology of Nile Valley civilizations, blinded by racial paradigms, found it inconceivable that such artifacts as he had unearthed in Nubia could have been created by indigenous Blacks. He speculated instead that white Libyans created and governed this ancient Nubian civilization and later withdrew, leaving it to be governed by Blacks. Reisner and his associates also expressed the belief that, at best, the black-skinned Nubians were poor imitations of their brown-skinned neighbors to the north. C. G. Seliguman, a British anthropologist and author of Races of Africa, advanced a similar view in the 1920’s. According to Seliguman, Negroes are too primitive to be capable of any advanced thought. Seliguman proposed that ancient civilizations in Africa were created by Hamites, whom he regarded as Caucasians and belonging to the same branch of mankind as almost all Europeans.
Such were the racial convictions when the gigantic Olmec heads with Negroid features were discovered in the village of Tres Zapotes, Mexico. These heads had been buried ceremonially during the time of the Olmecs and they remained undiscovered for three thousand years. American and European archaeologists, in referring to this ancient culture, often call it the Olmec problem, a problem presumably because the observable facts do not fit the accepted social paradigms. If the evidence of these mammoth sculptures is to be believed, there was an advanced African presence in the Americas at about the time that Moses and the Hebrews departed from Egypt and were crossing the deserts in search of a Jewish homeland. The evidence suggests that Africans were in the so-called New World some twenty-three centuries before the Vikings and some twenty-seven centuries before Columbus, and this creates serious problems for supporters of the paradigm of African inferiority.
NOTES
1 Berry, Brewton, and Tischler, Henry L., Race and Ethnic Relations, Fourth Edition, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1978, P33.
2 Lynch, William, “How to Make A Slave,” a speech delivered on the banks of the James River in 1712.
3 Berry, op cit., p54.
4 Browder, Anthony T., Nile Valley Contributions to Civilization, The Institute of Karmic Guidance, Washington, D.C., 1992, P137.
5 Berry, op cit., P57.
6 ibid., P58.
7 ibid., P53,54.
8 Hoebel, E. Adamson, Anthropology: The Study of Man, Third Edition, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1966, ., P145.