Did Slavery Cause Racism?
Did slavery cause racism?
Viewpoint: Yes. With the slave trade racism became rigidly defined in custom and law.
Viewpoint: No. Slavery followed from racism and reinforced existing perceptions of blacks' racial inferiority. Racism both preexisted and survived slavery.
The color of Africans' skin intrigued, frightened, and repelled Europeans. Exaggerating the physical and mental differences that allegedly separated blacks from whites, European writers conjectured that blacks had descended from apes or had emerged as the result of a biblical curse on the descendants of Canaan and Ham. With the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade toward the end of the seventeenth century, theories of black inferiority abounded. It was, after all, in the interest of slave traders and slave owners to propagate the myth that Africans were not human beings, or at least not fully human, a species different from the rest of humanity. Defined as brutish and bestial, heathen and savage, Africans seemed to Europeans as fit only for slavery.
It is not clear why Europeans fixated on the skin color of Africans. Perhaps they did so simply because the physical appearance of blacks was so markedly different from their own and, regarding themselves as superior beings, most Europeans associated a series of negative characteristics with blacks. This view of blacks preceded slavery and helped to justify it. At the same time, slavery deepened racism. The two seem to have existed in tandem.
During the eighteenth century some thinkers, notably Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, Baron de Montesquieu, Abbé Guillaume-Thomas-François de Raynal, and Adam Smith implicitly offered some hope for Africans by suggesting that environment rather than genetics determined the human personality. Scholars such as these suggested that one could remove the blacks from Africa, educate them in the customs of Western civilization, introduce them to the Christian faith, and they would become like white men. Abbé Raynal went
Viewpoint: Yes. With the slave trade racism became rigidly defined in custom and law.
Viewpoint: No. Slavery followed from racism and reinforced existing perceptions of blacks' racial inferiority. Racism both preexisted and survived slavery.
The color of Africans' skin intrigued, frightened, and repelled Europeans. Exaggerating the physical and mental differences that allegedly separated blacks from whites, European writers conjectured that blacks had descended from apes or had emerged as the result of a biblical curse on the descendants of Canaan and Ham. With the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade toward the end of the seventeenth century, theories of black inferiority abounded. It was, after all, in the interest of slave traders and slave owners to propagate the myth that Africans were not human beings, or at least not fully human, a species different from the rest of humanity. Defined as brutish and bestial, heathen and savage, Africans seemed to Europeans as fit only for slavery.
It is not clear why Europeans fixated on the skin color of Africans. Perhaps they did so simply because the physical appearance of blacks was so markedly different from their own and, regarding themselves as superior beings, most Europeans associated a series of negative characteristics with blacks. This view of blacks preceded slavery and helped to justify it. At the same time, slavery deepened racism. The two seem to have existed in tandem.
During the eighteenth century some thinkers, notably Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, Baron de Montesquieu, Abbé Guillaume-Thomas-François de Raynal, and Adam Smith implicitly offered some hope for Africans by suggesting that environment rather than genetics determined the human personality. Scholars such as these suggested that one could remove the blacks from Africa, educate them in the customs of Western civilization, introduce them to the Christian faith, and they would become like white men. Abbé Raynal went