The author of “Whiteness” traces the evolution of race as a social and political instrument, from its beginnings in ancient hierarchies through European colonial expansion and into contemporary times.
In his book “Critique of Black Reason,” philosopher Achille Mbembe writes that whiteness is, “in many ways, a fantasy produced by the European imagination, one that the West has worked hard to naturalize and universalize.” It is a fantasy long in the making. Categorizing and ascribing meaning to difference is a common human trait; we often need to categorize to get by and make sense of the world around us. Sometimes this classification is harmless, and sometimes not. Many ancient texts, for instance, spoke of and ascribed difference to peoples, but did not racialize. It is only with the so-called Age of Exploration, when Europeans reached the western hemisphere, or extended their reach and power deeper into Africa or Asia, that the conditions for a racialized social structure were fully in place.
What would become what we can now recognize as racial formation initially took the language of theology for its model. One particularly common model for arranging beings in the world were cosmic hierarchies, sometimes called a scala naturae (ladder of nature) or the “Great Chain of Being.” These ladders or chains envisioned all creation as connected in a hierarchy from the lowest to the highest forms of being, frequently with God on top after the rise of Christianity.
Attested in antiquity, as early as in the philosophy of Aristotle (384–322 BC), they were topics of much debate throughout the Middle Ages and into early modernity. The scalae were often ordered on the level of species. They rarely included racial classifications before the 1600s, when racial thinking entered so-called Western consciousness to stay. Early racial scalae, like those of economist and statistician William Petty (1676) or anatomist Edward Tyson (1699), didn’t garner much attention, but by the time the aptly named physician Charles White offered his white supremacist “An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables; and from the Former to the Latter” in 1799, racial classification was a welcome tool for those who wanted to motivate the violent conquest of people, land, and resources.
The essentialism of racial thinking took long to develop. Ancient Greeks, Romans, and others displayed varieties of xenophobia, but almost always with an “escape hatch” in conversion or assimilation. Slow movements toward essentialism in prejudices about European Jewry and Black Africans took place over centuries. While anti-Judaism had been part and parcel of Christianity almost from its inception, it wasn’t until the 12th and 13th centuries that some began to speak about an insurmountable difference between Jews and Gentiles. And although the association of the color black with evil has long roots, it didn’t translate everywhere into anti-Black sentiment. Spanish anti-Judaism started to include ideas about the purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) in the 14th and 15th centuries, framed in terms of whether someone was Christian or not, rather than in terms of white and nonwhite, but it stands as a historical “segue between the religious intolerance of the Middle Ages and the naturalistic racism of the modern era,” writes historian and author George M. Fredrickson, in its incipient biologization of difference. Similarly, while it was never universally accepted, the so-called curse of Ham gradually connected Black Africans with Noah’s son Ham, who was cursed by his father to be a servant. The curse was the basis for centuries of debate about the legitimacy of enslaving Black people; some used it to motivate enslavement, and others to oppose it.
Source: thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
