Reply #21: Really, no one denies that economics did not [View All]

[Kind of Blue]

play a role and constant dehumanization of the "other" but to deny that racism did not precede slavery is flawed.

Here is part of the introduction of the link I referenced above.

The evolution of racial slavery, first in Europe, then in the Atlantic islands, and finally in the Americas was a process that was always building on the experiences of the past. I do not mean to suggest a teleological inevitability in this process. Quite the contrary, Europeans made conscious decisions in constructing themselves and others during this time, decisions that often saw various European nations in conflict with one another.

Nevertheless, from as early as the fifteenth century Europeans shared a common matrix of perception in their assessments of cultural and racial “others.” Although fragmentation, competition, and warfare existed between various European nations, these divisions could be measured in degrees. Catholics and Protestants fought for religious supremacy, but all European nations were Christian nations. Kings and Queens fought for sovereignty and the rights of succession, but all European nations had centralized monarchies. In southern Europe, humanism was utilized to strengthen the Catholic Church, while in northern Europe it was a tool of Protestants. Nevertheless, the scholarship and inquiry that were at the core of humanist philosophy placed new emphasis on individual rights across Europe.

Thus, even as Europe was in turmoil in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, these conflicts over the correct forms of Christianity, centralized government, and individual rights served to reinforce a broadly shared definition of what it meant to be “European.” This “oneness” was brought into sharp effect when Europeans encountered “new” peoples in Africa and the Americas, and it strongly impacted on their decisions to enslave.

When the Atlantic slave trade began in 1441, most Africans were placed into an entirely new and different category of enslaveable peoples. On the one hand, they were considered “gentiles,” theoretically capable of conversion to Christianity and even integration into the emerging nation-state (whose subjects were defined primarily by their Christian identity). On the other hand, Africans were considered so “barbaric” that their human capacities were often called into question. Describing the first African slaves taken by the Portuguese via the Atlantic, royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara noted that they were “bestial” and “barbaric.”2 Similarly, Hernando del Pulgar, appointed royal historian of Spain in 1482, wrote that the inhabitants of the Mina coast were “savage people, black men, who were naked and lived in huts.”3 During this early period, the cultural gulf that relegated Africans to barely-human status meant that spiritual and cultural “redemption” was a virtual impossibility.