Is Racism a Western Idea?
by Dinesh D`Souza
Dmesh D`Souza is the John M. Olin Scholar at the .L/ American Enterprise Institute and author of The End of Racism, published last fall by The Free Press, 724 pp., $30. Born in Bombay, India in 1961, he became a United States citizen in 1991. He is also the author of Iliberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. This article appeared in The American Scholar, Vol. 64, No. 4, Autumn 1995. Copywrite c1995 by the author. It was published for general circulation by Phi Beta Kappa and is reprinted here with their kind permission as well as that of the author. An annual subscription to that quarterly can be had for $25; and is eminently worth the money. Their address is 1811 Q Street, Washington, D.C. 20009.
NOTE FROM FINAL PARAGRAPH: Although we may find it painful to read what people in earlier centuries had to say about others, it remains profoundly consoling to know that racism had a beginning, because then it becomes possible to envision its end.
In this article:
- Is Racism Universal?
- Racism and Slavery
- Were the Ancient Greeks Racist?
- The Chinese and Arab View of Blacks
- The Civilization Gap
- The Embarrassment of Primitivism
- The Collapse of Environmentalism
- The Nature of Superiority
The contemporary mood of frustration and pessimism about race relations springs from the apparent failure of the civil rights movement to heal the historic division between whites and blacks in this country. In the 1950s and 1960s, supporters of civil rights argued that racism was based on ignorance, fear, and hate. The proposed solutions were education and integration. Scholars contended that as whites came into closer contact with blacks-as they studied and lived and worked alongside them-their long-standing prejudices and stereotypes would dissipate and ignorance would give way to enlightenment. Today`s liberal melancholy arises largely out of the recognition that enlightenment has failed.
Consequently, many white liberals and black activists seem to have embraced the view, popularized by the black legal scholar Derrick Bell and the white political scientist Andrew Hacker, that racism is (as Bell puts it) an "integral, permanent and indestructible" feature of the human condition or at least of the Western psyche. In this view, since it is unrealistic to expect that American society can transcend race, the only practical solution is to institutionalize it. Proportional representation in job hiring and multiculturalism in education are aimed at promoting such prudent race management. Yet neither remedy offers much hope of moving America closer to Martin Luther King`s dream of a society in which we are judged by ability and character rather than by color. A generation after King articulated that vision, America is a less hopeful and more race-conscious society.
To see whether this contemporary liberal melancholy is justified, iris essential to ask some fundamental questions about the origins of racism. Scholars who study the subject have advanced three general theories to explain it. The first view, which is perhaps the most prevalent, is that racism is a universal problem-virtually all societies throughout recorded history have endured racism in one form or another. An alternative suggestion, put forward especially by Marxist scholars, is that racism is a product of slavery and that it developed as a rationalization or excuse for enslaving other people. Finally, some black nationalists and Afrocentrists argue that racism is a peculiar feature of the Euro-American mind, and its roots go back to the origins of Western civilization.
All these views, I intend to argue, are wrong. Racism is not a universal staple of the human condition. Racism did not always exist in the West. Nor is racism a product of slavery. An examination of the historical record reveals that racism did have a beginning. Although it can be found in embryonic form among the Chinese and the Arabs in the late Middle Ages, racism is a modern and Western idea. Racism developed before slavery, although it was later reinforced by slavery. Far from being the product of irrationality racism arose in Europe as part of a rational and scientific project to understand the world. Racism was inspired by the European voyages abroad, which produced an unprecedented project to classify and rank the diversity of the world`s plants, animals, and peoples. For European travelers, missionaries, and ethnologists, racism provided a coherent account of large civilizational differences that could not be attributed to climate or environment and were therefore considered intrinsic. Racism arose as a theory of Western civilizational superiority.
Although the term is used in various ways, the basic meaning of racism is clear. Racism is a theory of intellectual or moral superiority based upon the physical characteristics of race. According to Webster~ New World Dictionary, it refers to a "doctrine of teaching.. that claims to find racial differences in character and intelligence" and that "asserts the superiority of one race over another, as well as "any program or practice of racial discrimination or segregation based on such beliefs."
From this definition one must meet four criteria to qualify as a racist.
First, one must believe in the existence of biologically distinguishable races.
Second, one must rank these in terms of superior and inferior groups.
Third, one must hold these rankings to be intrinsic or innate.
Finally, one must seek to use them as the basis for denying other people their rights based on their membership in a particular racial group.
The prevailing view, shared by virtually everyone in today`s debate, is that racism is a product of irrational antipathy. Yet this assumption raises a historical problem: if racism is a product of ignorance, fear, and hate, why is it the case that the beliefs most people would unhesitatingly consider racist were shared by many of the most enlightened, courageous, and humane figures in America and in the West until only a few decades ago? It is hard to deny that many of the most eminent European and American religious leaders, philanthropists, philosophers, scientists, and statesmen were, by modern criteria, outright racists. Nothing could be more ridiculous than to imagine such leading figures as David Hume or Immanuel Kant cowed and blinded by simple superstitious fright. They weren`t "threatened" by blacks. Yet here is what Hume wrote in 1748:
I am apt to suspect that the Negroes, and in general all the other species of men, to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was any civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no ciences. …Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction.
Kant, no less harsh, in 1764 remarked:
The Negroes of Africa have received from nature no intelligence that rises above the foolish. The difference between the two races is thus a substantial one: it appears to be just as great in respect of the faculties of the mind as in color.
Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hegel, and Thomas Jefferson held similar views. Why did they believe as they did?
Is Racism Universal?
Ignorance, fear, and hatred are all human qualities and, as such, universal. Consequently, if racism were a product of unreasonable insecurity and hostility, we would expect to find it in virtually all societies at all times. In fact, scholars vehemently disagree about whether racism is universal. Some confidently maintain, as Joel Kovel did in White Racism, that "racist phenomena are ubiquitous throughout history" and that "racial hatred is built into human nature." Racism is "an ancient form of behavior that is probably found worldwide," Tzvetan Todorov asserts. Stephen Gould suspects that racial prejudice is "as old as recorded history." In a well-known textbook, Thomas Gossett claims to have discovered racist sentiments in the ancient civilizations of Egypt, China, India, and Greece.
Yet no one who espouses the universal view of the origins of racism has made a systematic historical study to identify the presence of racism in all human cultures. Typically, scholars make a kind of grand global survey, foraging for facts that seem to suggest animus and conflict between groups, which they cite to demonstrate the ubiquity of racism. For example, some Chinese historians of the Han dynasty in the third century B.C. describe their encounters with savage people "who greatly resemble the monkeys from whom they are descended." The Chinese of the T`ang period seem to show unmitigated contempt for the nakedness and primitivism of the dark islanders of the south. In India there is the long legacy of the caste system, which seems somehow racist. Historians cite numerous examples of African tribes such as the majestic Zulus who frequently link other tribes with wild beasts. And we know that Muslim travelers during the Middle Ages frequently made derogatory comments about blacks, such as the eleventh-century scholar Sa`id al-Andahssi, who found Ethiopians and Nubians "fickle, foolish, ignorant, and lacking in self-control."
These examples seem to establish decisively the presence of color consciousness in various cultures of the ancient world. They also indicate that some Chinese, Indians, Zulus, Greeks, and Muslims did not practice the modern art of euphemism: they spoke with brutal candor about aliens and outsiders. We may reasonably conclude that convictions of superiority seem to be widely held by ancient societies. But do these adverse sentiments amount to racism?
Consider the case of the Indian caste system. At first glance, it displays many of the features that would be expected in a racist society. The caste system is hierarchical and hereditary. Lower castes are stigmatized and marked out as inferior. There are strict prohibitions on social contact between members of higher and lower castes. Yet all the members of the various castes-Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaisya, and Shudra-belong to the same race. In other words, the caste system erects religious and social distinctions among people who share similar features and cannot be easily distinguished on the basis of appearance. Moreover, Hindus typically ascribe caste status not to biological features but to good or bad actions performed in a previous life.
Other examples prove equally problematic. The ancient Chinese were highly xenophobic, regarding their "Middle Kingdom" as the center of the universe, and all foreigners worthy only to be sycophants and worshipers at the feet of the Chinese emperor, who ruled with a "mandate from heaven." Because of the relatively high state of Chinese civilization, members of the Chinese ruling class had for centuries regarded Europeans as barbarians. The problem with pronouncing this attitude to be racist, however, is that the Chinese were just as hostile to the Japanese, the Koreans, and other subjugated Asian peoples who looked very much like them as they were toward foreigners who were white and brown and black. The Chinese never developed a racial hierarchy among peoples or a specifically biological basis for claims of superiority. The Chinese did not discriminate based on race: they held themselves to be superior to everyone.
The Zulus, a conquering force in southern Africa, were famously ethnocentric, regarding their own group as the center of the universe. But so in their own way were the Sothos, the Dinka, the Fulani, the Wolof, the Hausa, and many other African nations. The differences, italicized in tribal conflict, typically had nothing to do with color, since the combatants had that quality in common. For instance, the main physical characteristic dividing the feuding Tutsi and Hutu, who inhabit modern Rwanda and Burundi, is height.
The Muslim writer Said al-Andalusi`s views about Ethiopians and Nubians must be placed in the context of his even harsher appraisal of white Europeans, particularly Slays. "Their temperaments are frigid, their humors raw… .They lack keenness of understanding and clarity of intelligence, and are overcome by ignorance and dullness, lack of discernment, and stupidity." Typical of Muslim writing in the Middle Ages, al-Andalusi`s work comments harshly on all communities that are perceived not to possess the civilizing light of Islam, regardless of their race or color. AlAndalusi is entirely in the tradition epitomized by a tenth-century Islamic writer:
The people of Iraq have sound minds, commendable passions, balanced natures, and high proficiency in every art, together with well-proportioned limbs, well-compounded humors, and a pale brown color, which is the most apt and proper color. They are the ones who are done to a turn in the womb. They do not come out with something between blond, blanched and leprous coloring, such as the infants dropped from the wombs of the women of the Slays and others of similar light complexion; nor are they overdone in the womb until they are burned, so that the child comes out black, murky, malodorous, stinking, and crinkly-haired, with uneven limbs, deficient minds, and depraved passions, such as the Ethiopians and other blacks who resemble them. The Iraqis are neither half-baked dough nor burned crust, but between the two.
Today, of course, such theorizing is rare, but it was widespread in the ancient world. Anthropologists have discovered precisely the same account of the origins of skin color in African and American Indian cultures. Only in each case the details are adjusted so that the ideal complexion belongs to the group espousing the belief.
What emerges from these examples is a crucial distinction that anthropologists and historians make between racism on the one hand, and tribalism or ethnocentrism on the other. While racism refers to the hierarchical ranking of human beings based on biological characteristics, tribalism and ethnocentrism are nothing more than an intense preference for one`s own group over strangers. Racism is necessarily based on biology, whereas ethnocentrism is typically rooted in culture. Nationality, religion, shared traditions, and mere geographical proximity are much more common denominators for tribalism and ethnocentrism than is race.
Tribalism and ethnocentrism are universal. All human communities from the beginning of time, whether primitive or advanced, Western or non-Western, are self-centered and culturally narcissistic; they regard strangers with caution, if not aggression. The anthropologist Ruth Benedict pointed out that the formula "I belong to the elect" is characteristic of agrarian and pre-modern societies, many of whose tribal names, in their own languages, mean "human beings or men," in contrast to outsiders, who are regarded as less than human and eligible for hunting or enslavement. Tribalism may be described as a strong group loyalty that we feel in varying degrees for our family, our children, our close relatives, our religious group, our country of origin. Groups, like individuals, tend to be self-interested; ethnocentrism parallels egocentrism. This group feeling creates a solidarity among inhabitants of a community that many scholars argue is a necessary basis for defense of the group and cooperation among its members.
Ethnocentrism and tribalism are typically accompanied by provincialism or narrow-mindedness, and xenophobia, but these, too, are not the same as a racism. Conflicts between Serb and Croatian, Sikh and Hindu, Basque and Spanish, Protestant and Catholic, English and Irish, Turk and Armenian are undoubtedly tribal conflicts characterized by ethnocentric loyalties, yet they pit against each other groups that have the same skin color and belong to the same race. One would have to stretch the definition of racism beyond comprehension to term these racist conflicts.
Nor is anti-Semitism simply an express of racism. Contrary to Nazi propaganda, Jews do not make up a biologically distinct race; they are a religious and cultural group made up of white Jews, brown Jews, and black Jews. For centuries, Christian hostility to Jews was not based on race but upon alleged Jewish complicity in deicide and upon Jewish rejection of the Messiah. Even secular anti-Semitism has a career distinct from racism. Precisely because Jews enjoyed a kind of protective coloration and could not be easily distinguished from other Germans, the Nazis were compelled to use yellow stars, tattoos, and other insignia to mark them for discrimination and ultimate extermination.
Those who assert that racism can be found in all societies throughout history, then, are wrong. While we can locate various forms of tribalism and ethnocentrism, these do not amount to racism. "Racism, unlike ethnocentrism," the sociologist Pierre Van Den Berghe rightly concludes, "is not a universal phenomenon. Only a few human groups have deemed themselves superior because of the content of their gonads."
Racism and Slavery
If racism is not strictly universal, perhaps it originated, as some scholars suggest, as an ideological support for slavery. In Capitalism and Slavery Eric Williams claims that slavery developed entirely for economic reasons: "Slavery was not born of racism; rather, racism was the consequence of slavery." The historian Basil Davidson writes that "race contempt crept in when free men could justify their material interests by the scorn they had for slaves." Such popular writers as Salman Rushdie and Lerone Bennett echo these sentiments. On one point these writers are surely right: over time in America, the practice of slavery supported and perpetuated racism. It is not hard to see how white Americans who enslaved Africans for hundreds of years would develop a doctrine of inferiority to rationalize the oppression. Once transatlantic slavery developed, as Winthrop Jordan argues, a symbiotic and mutually reinforcing relationship evolved between slavery and racism.
But from this it does not follow that slavery can account for the origin of racism. Racism burgeoned and flourished in Europe from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries even in places such as the Scandinavian countries where there were few slaves or none at all. Traveling in America during the early nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that hostility to blacks was much stronger in the states where slavery was virtually extinct than in the slaveholding regions. "Prejudice against color is stronger North than South," the black abolitionist Frederick Douglas agreed. Racial bias against blacks seems to have existed before transatlantic slavery and indeed to have constituted one of the reasons that Europeans chose to transport Africans as slaves to the New World. It is surely significant, afrer all, that Europeans did not persist in enslaving Indians or other groups but ended up with an exclusively black slave population. Racism is habitually equated with slavery today because the two practices evolved together in America. But in this respect the American experience is historically unique. As Orlando Patterson demonstrates in Slavery and Social Death, slavery is a universal institution practiced in virtually all nations for thousands of years.
Slavery has existed from the dawn of human history right down to the 20th century, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized. There is no region on earth that has not at some time harbored the institution. Probably there is no group of people whose ancestors were not at one time slaves or slaveholders.
Slaves were usually acquired by kidnapping, as payments of tribute, debt, and taxation, and by inheritance. People sometimes sold themselves or their children into slavery to relieve poverty and starvation. By far the most common method to gain slaves was through war and captivity. In many societies slavery was regarded as the humane alternative to the accepted practice of killing captives: frequently the male combatants were slain, and women and children were spared for use as concubines and slaves. Hardly a European invention, slavery of this sort was widely practiced in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
The ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Assyrians all practiced slavery, and defined slaves as property. Indian temples regularly used slaves, and India2s oldest legal treatise, the Laws of Manu, which dates to the second century B.C., prescribes slavery as a punishment for failure to pay a fine. The Greeks and Romans employed slaves as domestic servants, craftsmen and artisans, common laborers, gladiators, and soldiers. In ancient Burma, northern Europe, and the Near East, slaves were also used as articles of trade and sometimes as a form of currency in place of money. The ancient Chinese used both domestic and imported slaves and customarily buried them alive with their deceased masters.
Yet although the Chinese, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, black Africans, and native Americans all placed human beings into bondage, the remarkable fact about slavery in the ancient world is that it had little or nothing to do with race. Scholars of the subject conclude that most of the slaves in ancient India, China, Europe, and Africa belonged to the same race as their owners. Of the total slave population in the five centuries before Christ, the largest number was probably that of white slaves. The term "slave" actually derives from "Slav," a reference to the large number of white slaves captured from that region of Central Europe. During the Middle Ages, David Brion Davis points out, in the cosmopolitan slave markets of Baghdad and Constantinople, traders erected platforms for the display of black slaves, white slaves, brown slaves, and yellow slaves. Surveying the historical record on slavery and racism, Pierre Van Den Berghe concludes:
"Slavery has often existed without a trace of racism. Conversely, racism can develop and persist in the absence of slavery."
Were the Ancient Greeks Racist?
A third possibility for the origin of racism, promoted mainly by Afrocentric scholars, is that racism is a uniquely white pathology that can be traced to the beginnings of Western civilization. Marimba Ani contends that "racism is endemic to European history," arising out of a white "supremacist ideology" that has proved fearful and aggressive "since its inception in the Indo-European hordes of the North." Michael Bradley in The Iceman Inheritance argues that "racism is a predisposition of but one race of mankind-the white race."
The question of whether the Greeks, the Romans, and the early Christians were racist is examined in two books, Blacks in Antiquity and Before Color Prejudice, by the African American scholar Frank Snowden. An emeritus professor of classics at Howard University, Snowden is perhaps the leading scholar in the world on how blacks were viewed in ancient civilization. Analyzing the literary, numismatic, artistic, and archaeological evidence of encounters between Europeans and Ethiopians in the ancient Mediterranean, Snowden argues that despite the awareness of color differences in the ancient world, differences that were acknowledged and discussed in frank and sometimes pungent fashion, neither the ancient Greeks nor the early Christians espoused anything resembling a theory of racial superiority. By and large, the two groups espoused a positive view of the African blacks they knew best-the Ethiopians.
A cursory reading of Greek sources confirms this. For Homer, blacks were the blameless of the gods. Diodorus mentioned their widespread reputation for religious piety. Seneca found them notable for their courage and love of freedom. Lucian noted that in astrological knowledge they were the wisest of men. Herodotus, the first European to comment on the physical appearance of Ethiopians, described them as the most handsome of men. Martial noted that, while he was pursued by a woman whiter than a swan, he sought the affections of one blacker than pitch. Snowden quotes a Greek epigrammatist, Asclepiades, "Gazing at her beauty I melt like wax before the fire. If she is black, what is that to me? So are coals, but when we burn them, they shine like rosebuds." Snowden concludes that manumissions were open to black slaves as much as to slaves of any other color.
Like countless other peoples, the Greeks were ethnocentric and regarded aliens as "barbarians," an onomatopoeic term apparently derived from the incomprehensible bar-bar-bar sound made by foreigners. Yet the epithet applied to anyone who could not speak Greek and who was therefore considered primitive. The Greeks did not describe as barbarians anyone on account of their skin color, and Snowden says there is no evidence that blacks were systematically associated with unintelligence. Strabo, he points out, concluded that the most barbarian people in the world were the Irish. The Greeks were well aware of variations in features and skin color, Snowden says. Like many other people in the ancient world, however, the Greeks were what we may call environmentalists: they typically attributed differences of appearance and of custom to the influence of geography and climate. Ptolemy found some of the habits of black Africans primitive; he blamed them not on natural deficiencies but on the enervating and oppressive temperature of the region. In general, the Greeks attributed the dark skin of the Ethiopians to the sun`s heat.
One of the clearest expressions of the Greek understanding of racism and slavery is found in the work of Aristotle. "It is clear that some are by nature free, and others are by nature slaves," Aristotle writes in The Politics, "and for these latter the condition of slavery is both beneficial and just." This statement is sometimes cited as an early expression of Western prejudice. Aristotle also denounces virtually all non-Greeks as barbarians. Yet although he supports the institution of slavery, Aristotle distinguishes between natural slavery and conventional slavery, recognizing that many foreign people are enslaved purely on account of accidents such as shipwreck, kidnapping, or being captured in wars. Aristotle makes a crucial distinction between free men who are capable of being citizens and slaves who by nature are incapable of assuming personal and civic responsibilities. In justifying slavery and condemning barbarism, Aristotle shows no interest in group differences of appearance or color. His theories of servitude and citizenship are ethnocentric; they have no racial basis. Aristotle reserved some of his harshest cultural observations for Northern Europeans, the English in particular, whom he regarded as "incapable of ruling over others" and "wanting in intelligence and skill."
Scholars studying the Christian era that supplanted the classical one in Europe have found much evidence of prejudice and hostility, so that Christianity today is routinely criticized for encouraging, if not inventing, racism, sexism, and homophobia and for providing a spiritual justification for slavery, and colonialism. Forrest Wood`s The Arrogance of Faith is a wholesale assault on a religion that Wood alleges "has been fundamentally racist in its theology, organization and practice." Yet Wood`s inquiry seems to surprise even the author. "In none of the biblical passages directly or obliquely sanctioning slavery could one find a specific reference to race or color," he concedes. "Despite the association of darkness with all that was evil and demonic, early Christians did not, in fact, exhibit a negative attitude toward black people generally."
The primary distinction that Christians made was between the believer and the infidel. For example, Saint Augustine (who was himself an African) emphasized, distinguishing between the "City of God" and the "City of Man," that it is through the instrument of conversion that all may be equal as children of God and as citizens in a Christian civilization. The religious commitment of the early Christians generated a passionate universalism, as reflected in Paul`s letter to the Galatians: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." For the convert to the faith, racial and even cultural differences were superseded by Christian brotherhood. No group was excluded: as Martin Bernal has pointed out, early Christian and medieval illustrations routinely portray one of the magi who came to worship the infant Christ as black.
This brings us to the issue of color symbolism. The early Christians appropriated pagan images of the sun as a source of life, and light as a symbol of divinity. Frank Snowden argues, however that in contrast to contemporary prejudices about color, for the early Christians the symbolic attachment of darkness and evil in no way implied that black people were cast outside the orbit of salvation or Christian acceptance. Origen, one of the fathers of the early Christian church, argued that human souls are initially black like the Ethiopians, but through divine redemption all souls can be brightened. In fact Origen contrasts the Ethiopian`s natural hue, caused by the heat of the sun, with blackness in the soul, caused by sin and dereliction. In the same vein, Augustine urged Christians to go to the remotest corners of the world, including darkest Ethiopia, to spread the light of the Christian message.
Greeks, Romans, and early Christians made crucial distinctions-between nature and custom, between civilization and barbarism, between salvation and damnation-that would later be invoked to justify racism. But there is no racism in the distinctions themselves, nor can the ancient and early Christian societies of the West be rightly accused of color prejudice.
The Chinese and Arab View of Blacks
ft should not be imagined that the absence of racism in the ancient world can be easily explained by the lack of civilizational contact between peoples. In fact, such contacts have existed for millennia. Yet such early encounters between the Chinese, the Indians, the Europeans, and the North Africans did not generate widespread convictions of intrinsic superiority, mainly because these civilizational exchanges in the ancient world were transacted between nations that had developed the economic, military, and cultural resources to project across continental chasms. As pointed out by William McNeill and Jerry Bentley, who have studied early cross-cultural encounters, only the richest and most powerful civilizations of the period could sustain trade and contact over great distances. Yet even the merchants and combatants could not have been unaware of the fragility of their enterprise, which carried such risks that no one could possibly consider any military or trade advantage to be enduring or permanent. There was no shortage of arrogance on the part of the Arabs, Europeans, Indians, and Chinese, but no grip was strong enough to dominate the others entirely, and so their hubris was tempered by respect among rivals of comparable strength. This began to change in the modern world when Western science and technology provided a decisive and seemingly irreversible advantage.
The African American scholar Alvin Poussaint identifies racism with "whites` deep fear of Africa," the result, he contends, of "white projection.. of all of the unacceptable impulses in themselves." In the view of Poussaint and other scholars, whites have a peculiar tendency to take their own bad qualities and deposit them on others, especially blacks. But before the rise of the modern West, there were the great civilizations of the Arabs and the Chinese that were the most advanced in the world in the late Middle Ages, and it is worth exploring what the people from those cultures thought about Africa.
The Chinese arrived on the coast of Africa several times between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries, especially during the famous voyages spearheaded by Cheng-ho during the Ming period of 1405-1433. Coming from perhaps the richest, most learned, and most technically skilled civilization on the planet for a thousand years, Chinese sailors were struck by what they viewed as the barbarism of southern Africa, and they speculated that Africans seemed incapable of developing an advanced society. As early as the eighth century, DuHuan, an official of the T`ang dynasty, found himself transported as a war captive to black Africa, probably the region now called Eritrea. His impressions, preserved in his Record of My Travels, were decidedly unfavorable. The blacks he found to be "uncouth," lacking in respect for their parents, and promiscuous to the point of practicing incest. A later expedition by Chinese sailors produced scary and fantastic accounts of African divination, including reports of magicians who could change themselves into beasts and birds.
J.J.L. Duyvendak in China`s Discovery of Africa cites reports about Africa, preserved in Ming court histories, that suggest a subsistence economy. "They live in solitary and dispersed villages. The customs are very simple. The mountains are uncultivated. Fish are caught in the sea with nets." A nineteenth-century account by the geographer Xu Jiyu corroborates numerous European reports: black Africans appear as if they were living in the most ancient times., They were unable to develop a civilization by themselves."
Another navigating people, the Muslims, made numerous journeys to southern Africa. Like the early Christians, the Muslims have traditionally distinguished between believers and infidels. As with the Bible, the Koran expresses no racial or color prejudice. Yet Muslim travel accounts between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries show a condescending attitude toward blacks and also toward other groups perceived as unenlightened and culturally inferior. For a Persian writer, black Africans are "distant from the standards of humanity," for which he mainly blames the sun`s heat. Touring in Mali in the fourteenth century, the famous Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta is impressed to see complete safety and signs of religiosity; on the other hand, he deplores the primitivism of the locals, which is evident to him in "the reprehensible practice among many of eating carrion, dogs and asses."
At the same time, Muslim writers expressed no less derogatory views of Europeans. The Muslim geographer Mas`udi finds the Franks and Slays of Europe to be the ultimate barbarians, and they become paler, grosser, and dumber the farther north you go. He blames this on the absence of the sun`s heat. Battuta himself journeyed a good deal in Europe, where he was unimpressed by the level of culture, for which he blamed frigid weather and infidel faith. Perhaps tiring of temperature as an explanation, another Muslim traveler of the period attributes the stupidity of the Sicilians and Italians to their gross habit of eating onions.
One of the most famous accounts of black Africa is that of Ibn Khaldun, the leading Muslim historian of the late Middle Ages. For Khaldun, black Africans are "close in character to dumb animals. Most of them dwell in caves and thickets, live in savage isolation, and eat each other." Not to be exclusive, Khaldun adds: "The same applies to the Slays." We are amazed to find in Ibn Khaldun`s writings stereotypical perceptions of black Africans that most people would identify as the distinctive product of American prejudice. More than five hundred years ago, Khaldun wrote in his Muqaddimalz "We have seen that Negroes are in general characterized by levity, excitability and great emotionalism. They are found eager to dance
whenever they hear a melody." Yet Khaldun has an environmental explanation: the tropical climate. Whenever he gets into his hot bath, Khaldun informs his readers, he feels like singing! Yet one cannot find in Khaldun`s writings any doctrine of intrinsic biological superiority. The most we can say is that Khaldun implies, for whatever reason, that there is a large and possibly unbridgeable gap between the high culture of the Arab world and the primitivism of black Africa.
Although there is little doubt of their religious and cultural ethnocentrism, the Arabs and the Chinese seem not to have developed a systematic ideology of racism. What the Arab and Chinese encounter with Africa illustrates is the acute civilizational arrogance that goes with relative political, economic, military, and technological superiority. All cultures are ethnocentric and begin with notions of supremacy, but powerful cultures that encounter simpler and weaker societies are strengthened in their convictions of superiority. When such arrogance is given a biological foundation, racism is the result.
The Civilization Gap
Like the Chinese and the Arabs before them, what the European cognoscenti-the small population of explorers, travelers, soldiers, and missionaries who formed opinions on these matters-encountered and sought to explain was a widespread and conspicuous primitivism. The early European travelers were, by our standards, gullible about the rest of the world. Portuguese sailors kept a watchful eye for strange sea monsters and dog-headed men. Columbus himself fully anticipated finding "people born with tails" and other prodigies. Walter Raleigh, Francisco de Orellana, and John Swan displayed similar credulity.
Yet these Europeans did not approach Asia, Africa, and the Americas with hostile preconceptions. On the contrary, they were generally respectful and envious of the achievements of many foreign cultures. Much of the European fascination with the Far East was fired by the travel accounts of the Venetian explorer Marco Polo, who died in 1323 after serving in the court of the Great Khan, and left behind alluring (and somewhat exaggerated) catalogs of Oriental wealth. The Portuguese did not go to Africa in search of slaves; they were magnetically attracted by legends of African gold, and they wanted to find a way to the spice treasures of Asia. Some Europeans had a religious motive for going to Africa. They were tantalized by reports of a Christian prince living at the edge of the Muslim world; for more than three hundred years, Europeans would search for this elusive Prester John, who was widely believed to be black.
Whatever their shortcomings and mixed motives, the Europeans who voyaged abroad were the historical instruments of a major world transformation: the advent of modernity. Up until the late Middle Ages there were several civilizations of comparable military, economic, and political strength-Chinese, North African, Indian. But between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, this relative equilibrium began to change, and Europe emerged decisively as the most vibrant and powerful civilization. European strength was indicated by an increased production of goods, which generated rising standards of living; by increases in the population, owing to a declining death rate; by an increase in material and technical knowledge; and by military sophistication, which reflected both wealth and the application of new inventions. The reasons for Western hegemony are complex, but essentially the rise of Europe is connected to the evolution of three systems: science, representative self-government, and capitalism.
The rudiments of human curiosity, participation in public affairs, and the trading impulse are obviously universal traits. But the West developed specific institutional channels for these human proclivities-for instance, universities, parliamentary systems, joint stock companies-and specific mechanisms for assembling and processing political, economic, and general information: elections, the free market, the scientific method. These developments produced not simply a different way of fighting wars or building cathedrals, but a radically new way of seeing the world and man`s place in it. No longer did the best minds in Europe think that they lived in an "enchanted world," governed by mysterious spirits; rather, they were increasingly convinced that the universe operated according to rational laws, discernible to the human mind unassisted by divine revelation. For the first time, it seemed plausible to think of history as having a secular purpose and technology as the engine of irreversible progress. Francis Bacon`s hope-that a new kind of knowledge would enable "the relief of man`s estate," an increasing triumph over the elements-was being realized.
Europe between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries was a rich, powerful, increasingly self-conscious, and rapidly changing civilization. Several other societies had produced important inventions-for example, the Chinese invented printing and the compass; the number system came from India and was mistakenly called "Arabic numerals" because the Arabs brought it to Europe. Europeans knew that Muslim scholars in Toledo and elsewhere had preserved much of the learning of the classical world that made possible the humanist Renaissance of Petrarch, Rabelais, and Leonardo da Vinci. Yet civilizational development does not always accrue to the originators or even to the preservers of ideas, but to those who employ them in creative ways. European civilization was able to use foreign ideas and innovations, along with its own, to transform itself, while the institutions of other societies remained relatively unchanged. Between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the West made a swift and irreversible transition from a traditional society to a modern society. Enlightenment would help to produce Western success-and also Western racism.
The Embarrassment of Primitivism
For the Europeans who first voyaged abroad, much of the rest of world came as a shock for which they were poorly prepared.
Early modern accounts, such as those of Richard Halduyt in the sixteenth century or Samuel Purchas in the seventeenth century, convey the stupefaction of the Europeans who encountered distant and unfamiliar peoples. Europeans who were even then making a transition into the modern era found themselves genuinely amazed and horrified at other cultures that appeared virtually static, confined from time immemorial in the nomadic or the agrarian stage. The consequence was that many Europeans viewed the non-white peoples of Africa, the Americas, and elsewhere as savages and barbarians, "beyond the pale of civilization," to borrow Metternich`s phrase.
It is no accident that it was the Portuguese who arrived on the shores of black Africa and not the black Africans who voyaged to Europe. The Portuguese had the three-mast ship, the compass, the quadrant, the astrolabe, navigation charts, and a comparatively good knowledge of winds, currents, stars, and latitudes. The Portuguese knew, as did educated Europeans of the time, that the earth was not flat. When the Portuguese sailed abroad in the second half of the fifteenth century, they left an emerging modern European civilization that had almost a hundred universities; that had several hundred printing presses and some fifteen thousand book titles in circulation; that had cannons and body armor and gunpowder; that used modern business methods such as checks, bills of exchange, insurance, and double-entry bookkeeping; that had mechanical clocks and precision instruments; that had harnessed the power of wind and water to grind grain, crush ore, mash pulp for paper, saw lumber and marble, and pump water; that had built Gothic cathedrals. This technical head start would soon produce a very large gap between Europe and the rest of the world. The enormous European lead is suggested by just a few European inventions and technological advances of the period, a list that could be vastly multiplied: the microscope (1590), the telescope (1608), the barometer (1643), the pendulum clock (1656), the thermometer (1714), the spinning jenny (1770), the steam engine (1781), vaccination (1796), the electric battery (1800).
Essentially what happened, partly by historical accident, is that, between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the most advanced civilization in the world crashed into the shores of subSabaran Africa and the Americas, the natives had no numbers that went beyond one or two. The Europeans, increasingly skeptical and rationalistic in their outlook, became disdainful of cultures that insisted upon patterning behavior on the miraculousness of everyday life and in which one could converse with rocks, daily events were controlled by ancestral spirits, dancing and shouting made it rain, diseases could be cured by wearing masks, women could give birth to animals, and so on.
Southern Africa and the Americas were not the most primitive cultures in the world. Between the sixth and the fifteenth centuries, Africa saw the rise of the kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, which were large, rich in gold, and politically integrated. Foreigners frequently visited the trading centers of Benin and Kanem-Bornu. Undoubtedly it was a black African people who constructed the great monuments, including an ancient temple, in Zimbabwe. Parts of southern Africa enjoyed the benefits of Muslim literacy and learning. Ethiopia retained an ancient Christian civilization. In the Americas, the Maya, Inca, and Aztec civilizations were impressive for their sophisticated knowledge of the seasons and stars, an advanced calendar, elaborate techniques of weaving and ornamentation, and architectural brilliance that amazed the Spanish. Africa and the Americas were undoubtedly more developed than some of the monsoon forests of southeast Asia, some of the steppe and forest zones of northern Eurasia, and the islands off the coast of India and Australia, such as Tasmania and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which were still in the Paleolithic stage when Europeans arrived there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Apart from the availability of natural resources, the main reason for the relative underdevelopment of Africa, the Americas, and many other parts of the world, compared with China, India, Europe, and the Arab world, seems to be geographical separation. Civilization is largely a product of cultural interaction and shared knowledge. Yet the Americas were cut off from the rest of the world by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Black Africa is largely partitioned from north Africa by the Sahara Desert. True, camels could be used to cross the desert with great difficulty, but the camel is not native to southern Africa. Camels only came into general use for desert journeys around the fourth century A.D. The Arabs were the first to use dromedaries imported from Asia for large-scale caravans across the Sahara. Similarly, American Indians did not enjoy the advantages either of the horse or cattle until the Spanish brought them from Europe; consequently, native tribes were compelled to use inefficient modes of transportation, such as llamas and domesticated dogs. "Other cultures could pick up things from traders and missionaries and foreign visitors," notes the historian Philip Curtin. "The subSaharan Africans, like some of the Indian tribes, had to invent everything for themselves."
Three things a society needs in order to rise above a meager subsistence level are the wheel, the plow, and a written language. The wheel, one of the decisive human inventions for improving the efficiency of labor, is one of the oldest of civilizational resources. Every advanced civilization depended on it, and its invention is usually credited to ancient Mesopotamia, where there is evidence of its use before 3500 B.C. But the wheel was unknown in virtually all of black Africa, and also in pre-Columbian America, although strangely enough the wheel did exist in Mexico where it was only used as a toy. The plow was an essential instrument for the human transition from a hunger-gatherer society to some form of settled agriculture; it was first used in ancient Sumeria around 3500 B.C. Virtually no community in the Americas or black Africa knew about the plow until Europeans introduced it in the modern era. Every generation builds upon the knowledge of its ancestors largely because of the invention of writing, which is a mechanism for storing and accumulating knowledge, without which societies are forced to rely on the foibles of memory. "The lack of writing," the African philosopher Kwasi Wiredu observes with characteristic understatement, "is a definite handicap in the preservation and enhancement of a philosophical tradition." Also first encountered in Sumeria around 3500 B.C., writing became the foundation of learning in both the East and the West. But with the exception of Mayan hieroglyphics, writing was unknown in the Americas, even to the relatively advanced Aztecs; the Incas frequently communicated through the use of knotted threads. In black Africa, literacy was confined to small enclaves: Islamic outposts such as Timbuktu, the Christian culture in Ethiopia.
It is impossible, even for scholars hostile to the West, to deny the civilization gap. Some black activists such as Aime Cesaire even seek to make a virtue out of necessity, declaring African superiority on the grounds of primitive chic. "Hurrah for those who never invented anything, who never explored anything, who never discovered anything." For some white and African American scholars, however, different levels of civilizational accomplishment and specifically the low level of African development are sources of acute embarrassment. Consequently, many scholars attempt to deny the civilization gap, or they offer euphemisms to explain it away. Only a few historians, such as Philip Curtin and William McNeill, will say publicly that much of sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas was between one and four thousand years behind the West in technological development. McNeill is bold enough to state that a large number of peoples whom the Europeans encountered for the first time were virtually "still living in the stone age."
The Collapse of Environmentalism
Alexis de Tocqueville remarks that the historical results are usually civilizationally inferior power overwhelms a culturally superior power by force. The reason is that the barbaric victors can then acknowledge their cultural deficiencies and learn from the society they have subdued. For example, when the Romans supplanted the Greeks as the primary force in southern Europe, Romans acknowledged Greek cultural superiority, as suggested by the Roman poet Horace: "Captive Greece enslaved her fierce captor." Similarly, the primitive hordes from northern Europe who sacked Rome embraced over time the Christian faith and acquired, however partially, the essentials of Greco-Roman civilization. The Mongol swordsmen who overran China, India, Europe, and the Middle East inevitably encountered superior culture and assimilated into them.
By contrast, the Europeans of the modern era were both the more advanced civilization and the conquering power, which resulted, as Tocqueville warned, in uninhibited arrogance on the part of the victors and the total degradation of the vanquished. Yet Europeans from ancient times were familiar with themes of civilizational superiority and had generally attributed them to climate-the theory we have called environmentalism. Racism developed when the environmental explanation was found by many Europeans to be untenable. As Winthrop Jordan documents in his classic study White Over Black, neither skin color nor lack of scientific and intellectual achievement could be plausibly blamed on the soil or the sun. Thus atmospheric theories fell into disrepute.
Along with the Arabs, many Europeans had argued that blackness derives from the sun`s heat. The eminent naturalist Comte de Buffon insisted at the end of the eighteenth century that Africans were darkened by the sun and then passed on blackness as a hereditary feature to their descendants. Buffon predicted that if Negroes were brought to cold countries, their skin, over a few generations, would lighten. It did not take very long for Europeans to realize the error of that assumption. Europeans also noted with some chagrin, that the darkest people in Africa were the Wolof living near Cape Verde, not the Africans nearest the Equator. It came as a further surprise that Negro children born in Europe did not come out white. Nor did whites who lived and worked in the West Indies and other tropical zones turn black. When the English and French in America went north, where the climate was cooler, they were confident that they would find Indians with lighter skin; again, this expectation was proven wrong. Many Europeans who followed the path of Columbus to the Americas also believed that the primitive condition of the native Indians was largely the result of their living close to the line of the Equator. As Englishmen and Frenchmen moved northward, many of them expected to see Indian civilization improve in temperate and cooler climates. This turned out not to be the case. In some respects, the pattern was reversed. The most advanced Indian civilization was centered in the relatively hot environs of Mexico City; as the French moved north into what is now Canada, they found nothing of comparable sophistication.
It is important to recognize that Europeans were entirely convinced, based on the Bible, that all humans were simultaneously created by God and had inhabited the planet for the same amount of time. How to explain why one people had palaces and cathedrals and technology to explore the seas and the heavens, while other peoples rowed about in canoes and shot blow-darts at each other? Europeans found it difficult to give an explanation fot vAy, ovet the same period, one society seemed to have accomplished so much and other societies so little. Europeans have also had a long tradition of regarding noble and base qualities to be hereditary. This was part of the justification for a hereditary monarchy and aristocracy. In much of European literature we see suggestions that physical form is revealing, if not determinative, of qualities of character and intelligence. For all these reasons, it was not difficult for many Europeans to biologize their perceptions of the civilizational inferiority of other cultures.
Many Europeans began to assert with increasing frequency and confidence that the attributes of race, color, and human achievement are intrinsic. Some people are simply superior to others by nature. And since race and color appear to be hereditary, and since Europeans could not help noticing that they were white and the people they considered barbarian were dark skinned, they concluded that there must be some relationship between physical attributes, or race, and civilizational achievement. They came increasingly to believe that these racial inequities must be dictated by nature or history or even by God. Thus it was that European racism came into the world.
The Nature of Superiority
We see evidence of racism, complete with its rejection of environmentalism, in David Hume`s famous description of barbarism in Africa and around the world. Hume examines the possibility that black inferiority is not inherited but imposed by slavery. He dismisses that explanation on the grounds that the descendants of slaves and "low people" all over Europe have proved that they can rise above their ancestral histories and achieve literary, mathematical, and scientific distinction, whereas the backwardness of black Africans seems to him comprehensive and apparently ineradicable. "In Jamaica," Hume writes, "they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning, but it is likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly." Similarly, Immanuel Kant is skeptical that black inferiority is the sole product of unfortunate circumstance. "Among the whites," he observes, "people constantly rise up from the lowest rabble and acquire esteem through their superior gifts."
But for the classic expression of European racism we must turn to the French diplomat and scholar Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, who is today, if he is known at all, considered the embodiment of wickedness. He was a friend and respected correspondent of Tocqueville and in some respects one of the most learned exponents of the zengeist of the nineteenth century. Gobineau was also an acquaintance of Josiah Nott, an apologist for slavery who publicized Gobineau`s views in the American South, and of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the composer Richard Wagner, both of whom shared Gobineau`s love of aristocracy of birth and his hatred of equality. Gobineau was an elitist and an eccentric, but his racism made him a man of his time-it elevated him to high posts and made him widely admired. Moreover, his influence would prove lasting: in the twentieth century, Gobineau was one of Adolf Hitler`s favorite authors, and his works were popular textbooks in the schools of Nazi Germany.
Nowhere is the racist worldview more comprehensively stated than in Gobineau`s Inequality of Human Races, published in 1853. In it, Gobineau drew on the discoveries made by Orientalists such as William Jones that there was a common Aryan source for IndoEuropean languages such as Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and German. Gobineau argued that the highest aspirations of humanity were embodied in these Aryans, a single family of Germanic peoples who had infused European and even Asian culture with its brilliance and vigor. Gobineau writes that the existence of advanced and backward races-the former who live by codes of civility, ingenuity, and technological comfort, the latter who live by laws of force at a subsistence level-proves that some races are naturally superior to others. This superiority, Gobineau stresses, applies to races, not to individuals.
I will not wait for the friends of equality to show me such and such passages in books written by missionaries or sea captains, who declare that some Wolof is a fine carpenter, some Hottentot a good servant, that some Kaffir dances and plays the violin, that some Bambara knows arithmetic… Let us leave these puerilities, and compare together not men but groups.
If environmentalism is true, Gobineau asks, why have some groups endowed with rich natural resources nevertheless failed to produce a comparable civilization to that of Europe? "So the brain of a Huron Indian contains in an undeveloped form an intellect which is absolutely the same as that of the Englishman or the Frenchman!" he claims. "Why, then, in the course of the ages, has he not invented printing or steam power?" Gobineau suggests that "nowhere is the soil more fertile, the climate milder, than in certain parts of America. There is an abundance of great rivers, the gulfs, the bays, the harbors, are large, deep, magnificent, and innumerable. Precious metals can be dug out almost at the surface of the ground." And the same is true for large parts of Africa. So where, Gobineau asks, is the American Indian or African version of Caesar, Newton, Charlemagne, and Homer?
The equality of the races could be expected to produce a rough civilizational equality among cultures, Gobineau writes. "Early in the world`s history, they would have gladdened the face of the earth with a crowd of civilizations, all flourishing at the same time." Gobineau argues that the historical record refutes such political expectations. In fact, he contends, it is whites who have developed modern civilization, while other people have proved at best adept imitators. Civilization, Gobineau argues, depends on more than mere mimicry. "No one has a real part in any civilization until he is able to make progress by himself, without direction from others." In rhetoric that contemporary readers are sure to find troubling, Gobineau defies his readers to cite one example of a black civilization satis~ing these criteria, or even one truly great scientific invention accomplished solely by a black African. "I will wait long for the work to be finished," he says, "I merely ask that it may be begun. But it has never been begun; it has never even been attempted."
In the twentieth century, many of these racist ideas would come under ferocious assault, both on intellectual and moral grounds. Eventually the anti-racist view would prevail, and racism would be redefined to suit the new politics of a new age. But it is important to recover the origin of racism, because it teaches us that racism had a beginning both in space and in time. Whatever its later career, racism began as part of a rational project to understand human differences. Racism originated as an assertion of Western cultural superiority that was eventually proclaimed to be intrinsic. From the ancient world we get a glimpse of societies that respected nature rather than sought to subdue and conquer it, that were aware of physical differences but attached no importance to them-perhaps a model for a better society than the one we have now. In any event, there is no historical warrant for the extreme pessimism that holds that racism has always existed and will always exist.
Although we may find it painful to read what people in earlier centuries had to say about others, it remains profoundly consoling to know that racism had a beginning, because then it becomes possible to envision its end.
