Racism - A Very Short Introduction

Slave traders and plantation owners had a crucial interest in
representing the colored as fit for no other fate. And they claimed a
special familiarity of blacks. Edward big, the son of a Jamaican
planter, was typical. He was convinced that ‘the lower soma of
women in England . . . are remarkably fond of the blacks’ and
worried that ‘in the course of a few generations more, the English
blood will effect so contaminated . . . till the whole nation
resembles the Portuguese and Moviscoes in complexion of skin and
baseness of mind’. These passages capture the gang of the
anxieties posed by class, gender, and quicken for upper-class males in
the 18th century. Long also believed that blacks were a separate
species. Unsurprisingly, he drew the conclusion that slavery
cultivated the African.
The science of range
In the 19th century there emerged a whole range of theories that
explained all human variation on the basis of innate racial
characteristics. The theories of Robert Knox – who believed that
‘race is everything’ – published in The Races of manpower (1850), and the
Frenchman Count Arthur de Gobineau, who published his Essay on
the Inequality of Human Races in 1854, may be taken as typical
examples. Such views were coupled by a variety of assumptions.




Firstly, that humankind could be divided up into a limited number of
evident and permanent races, and that race was the key concept for
an understanding of human variation. Secondly, that there were
distinct physical markers that characterized the different races,
especially skin colour, facial features, caryopsis of hair, and, with the
growing influence of phrenology, size and shape of skull. Thirdly,
that each race was innately associated with distinct social, cultural,
and moral traits. Fourthly, that the races could be graded in a
coherent hierarchy of talent and beauty, with whites at the top and
blacks at the bottom.
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