Chapter 2.0. “Biological” Racism and Nineteenth-Century Ideologies, Introduction

The Novelty of Biological Racism. Although today a biologically-based racism is often considered an age-old type of prejudice, historical research over the last couple of generations shows that it is instead a relatively new phenomenon. The elements of this kind of racism developed gradually over the period of European colonialism between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, but only emerged in a fully-developed form in the mid-nineteenth century (ca. 1850), around the same time that the fields of modern biology, geology, and evolutionary theory were just emerging.

Earlier Focus on Cultural Difference. Earlier peoples were certainly capable of recognizing physical differences among ethnic groups when they saw them, such as when they moved between geographical regions that were distant from each other. They could also react to such differences in negative ways. Early cultures focused far more, however, on differences in language, customs, and religion. This made sense given that most early trade and warfare was conducted among adjacent groups of people who usually looked very much alike–as in the case of the various European groups that were constantly fighting among themselves.

Bloodlines. One of the most deeply-rooted aspects of modern, biological racism is a belief in the importance of inheritance and in blood as a carrier of inherited traits. Thus medieval nobles traced their superior “bloodlines” back to illustrious ancestors, and considered themselves to be the product of good breeding, in contrast to the lowly mass of peasants and commoners. This idea was also applied at times to entire groups, so that there was much discussion of the “character traits” of various ethnic or cultural groups–but again, these were usually fairly local distinctions that were made within what the nineteenth-century racial theorists began to consider as distinct sub-groups of the human species.

Assumption of Human Unity. Clear distinctions based on color began to appear in the law of slavery of the American colonies by the late 1600s, no doubt for reasons that were a matter of practicality for slave-owners. But through the founding era (ca. 1776-1800) and even later, there was relatively little attempt to justify or explain the enslavement of African-Americans or the treatment of Native Americans based on skin color and the associated beliefs that would develop later of inherent, biological differences. Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) is an early example of such thinking, but he proposes ideas about the biological inferiority of African-Americans only tentatively, while also considering the practical effects of slavery itself. And Jefferson himself, in company with all the founders whose ideas on this topic are known, shared in the standard assumption inherited from the Bible, from Greco-Roman thinkers (like Plato or Cicero), and from most early modern western thinkers too (e.g., Locke), that all people belonged to a single human species that was fundamentally the same.

Slavery as a Necessary Evil. In this context, rationales for the radically unequal treatment of African- and Native-Americans were made in terms of either cultural inferiority (e.g., exploited people were “savage” members of “uncivilized” cultures), religious difference, just practicality, or some combination of such ideas. In the case of slavery, its basic immorality was rarely denied. In other words, although this is very hard to understand today, both African-American slaves and Native Americans were understood to be fully human people, and in the case of most African-Americans and the more settled Native Americans, also Christian people. Yet such understandings did little or nothing to prevent very brutal and what we would call “dehumanizing” treatment.

Old Ideas Re-Purposed. Gradually, however, new ideas developed that were used to justify Europeans’ and Euro-Americans’ sense of superiority to other, broader groups of humanity. Some elements of such ideas can be found scattered in earlier periods, including ideas about blood inheritance discussed above.

The “Curse of Ham.” Another older idea that became more widespread in the nineteenth century was that the so-called “curse of Ham” had condemned Africans to perpetual servitude. This idea originated in the early Middle Ages (ca. 500-1000 CE), and was based on a fallacious interpretation of Genesis 9:20-27, which relates how Noah cursed Canaan, the son of Ham, because Ham had seen Noah naked. Noah is quoted as saying, “cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.” This passage mentions neither skin color nor any grouping of ethnic identities at the continental level. Nonetheless, centuries later a variety of medieval thinkers, both Christian and Islamic, began to trace the origins of people on three continents to the descendants of Noah named in Genesis, so that the peoples of Asia were said to descend from Shem, Europeans from Japheth, and Africans from Ham. Nineteenth-century racial theorists then seized on and developed the related medieval idea that the “curse of Ham” meant that Africans had been condemned by God to always be servants to people of the other two continents.

The Emergence of Biological Racism in the Nineteenth Century. Older bits and pieces of prejudice about physical appearances and geographical origins first became integrated into a pseudo-scientific theory of biological race in the nineteenth century. For the first time many scholars began studying and writing about broad sub-groups of humanity, usually categorized primarily on the basis of skin color. These new theories varied a great deal in terms of how many and which groups they recognized as being significant, with some authors focusing on three main groups (black, white, and yellow), others on five or more. They also varied in terms of the degree to which they argued for correlations between physical features and other traits, such as intelligence.

The remainder of this chapter provides an excerpt from the book by Lynn Hunt that we used before, Inventing Human Rights (Norton, 2007), to explore this topic. Hunt argues that the rise of ideas about biological race were part of a broader reaction against the new emphasis on human equality and human rights that emerged from the Enlightenment and from the American and French Revolutions. Racial ideas, like ideas about women’s inherent “domesticity,” were ways in which traditional hierarchies could be justified and re-asserted in the face of the beginnings of modern mass democracies.