Race, as a basic
idea for determining hierarchy, is a relatively new invention. In the late medieval
period, the majority of western Europeans, the ancestors of whites who would
colonize America and establish the institute of slavery, actually had a great
amount of respect for the Christian African Kingdom of Ethiopia. Rumors
abounded that the king of Ethiopia was the mythical “Prester John” who was held
in Catholic mythos as the most powerful and pious Christian king in the world.
Many in the Italian city-states even voiced support for a crusade to help the
Ethiopians fight Islamic forces that were based in modern day Somalia. In the
16th century, during the initial stages of the Atlantic slave trade,
Portuguese soldiers helped the Ethiopian king fight against the Ottoman Empire.
The Portuguese were among the first Europeans to actively engage in the slave
trade – the fact that they felt it fit to subordinate themselves to Ethiopian
interests at this point is extremely telling.
The medieval
standard for establishing a social hierarchy was based on religion – and it
should not be forgotten that the middle ages inspired many of the societal
norms that still hold in modern western society, such as national identity and
Christian societal morals. So the question here is simple: when did religious
discrimination turn into racial discrimination? To me it seems that slavery is
the answer and modern chattel slavery was essentially born on American
plantations – in the Caribbean islands, Spanish colonies in South America, but
also in what would become the United States. By the 1820’s the slavery system
relied entirely on race for its justification. This is where we began our study
of African American activism and thus the primary antagonist of sorts during
our study has been racism. But I think one of the most important takeaways to
be gained from comparing the context of our class with the greater arc of
western society. Racism has not always been the motivator of discrimination and
again race as we see it is a fairly new invention.
You bring up some interesting points, but I think we do need to keep in mind that all discrimination before Black slavery was not completely based on religion. Rather, a combination of religious and racially/ethnically-driven discrimination was the norm in most of Western Europe. I think you make an excellent point about colonialism reshaping the manner in which racial discrimination takes place, but ethnicities are inherently tied to religiosity (in public view) and thus affect one another and the subsequent discrimination.
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ReplyDeleteI agree that religion and ethnicity are frequently linked, both now and throughout history, but that linkage has not always been determined by what we would now call racial definitions: for example in 1204 Western European crusaders attacked Roman Byzantium and sacked the Hagia Sophia, the most holy church in the Eastern Roman tradition, becuase the cultural and sectarian divisions within European Christianity were sufficient to render each group, in the eyes of the other, a seperate and unrelated people. Frank Snowden, Professor Emeritus of Classics at Howard University, has noted that "nothing comparable to the color prejudice of modern times existed in the ancient world." I think it is important to remember that the world has been different than it is now, with regard to perceptions of race, and that it can be again. I know as a woman (especially one raised in an extremely conservative evangelical environment in which I was taught that men and women were not in fact created equal) I have really struggled with the despair of knowing that patriarchy has been dominant in nearly every culture in human history, and thinking that perhaps the struggle for gender equality is hopeless because it really does contradict the natural order. I think it can be incredibly heartening and impowering in the fight for racial equality to know that race as we see it today is a social construct, not a biological necessity, and that cultures that came before us recognized that.
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