Litnet

Hello, 

Francisco Bethencourt is the Charles Boxer Professor of History at King’s College, London, and a leading authority on the history of the Portuguese-speaking world. His latest book is Racisms: from the Crusades to the Twentieth century.

Vind hiermee 'n oorsig uit Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century van Francisco Bethencourt as aanvulling tot 'n vorige verwysing na Kant en Herder om hulle in konteks te plaas: 

In 1735, in his Systema Naturæ, Linnaeus placed human beings at the top of the animal kingdom. Man was classified in four categories: European, defined as white; American, defined as red; Asiatic, defined as dark; and African, defined as black. Two other categories, surprisingly, were added at the beginning and end of the classification of human beings: the wild man, classified as four-footed, mute, and hairy; and the monstrous man, “varying by climate and air.” 

Among the latter, Linnaeus distinguished small, active, and timid mountaineers, large and indolent Patagonians, less fertile Hottentots, beardless Americans, conical-headed Chinese, and flat-headed Canadians. The four initial categories continued, but were developed with the inclusion of physical and psychological attributes: the American was defined as copper colored, choleric, and erect, with black, straight, thick hair, wide nostrils, a harsh face, and a scanty beard; as content and free; and as painting themselves with fine red lines, as regulated by custom. The European was fair, sanguine, and brawny, with flowing yellow or brown hair, and blue eyes; they were light, acute, and inventive; and they covered themselves with garments with fastenings, as regulated by custom and law. The Asiatic was sooty, melancholic, and rigid, with black hair and dark eyes; they were severe, haughty, and covetous; they clothed themselves in loose garments; and they were governed by opinion. The African was black, phlegmatic, and relaxed; they had frizzy black hair, silky skin, a flat nose, and tumid lips; they were indolent, negligent, and crafty; they anointed themselves with grease; and they were governed by caprice.

The physical and psychological description of the four human races synthesized prejudices developed over the past three centuries, even though the origins of the African and Asian types may be found in classical antiquity—playful and careless on the one side, greedy and authoritarian on the other, and embodying the traditional perceptions of inconsistent Africa and Oriental despotism. Political stereotypes thus completed the picture: the American was regulated by custom, the European was controlled by law, the Asian was guided by opinion, and the African was governed by caprice. Linnaeus further stressed the supposed superiority of the European: muscular, inventive, and acute.

Buffon, who in 1749 published the first three volumes of a new, extensive natural history, which had an enormous impact on Europe, criticized Linnaeus’s obsession with classification. Buffon was interested in describing the variety of human beings across the continents; his purpose was to understand the impact of climate, food, habits, and migrations on man.

It is obvious that Buffon had his own criteria of classification, even if they were much more flexible than those of Linnaeus. He was keen to establish comparisons that would show continuities of human types from one continent to another. Contrasts between extreme human types were identified within the same continent, as in Africa or Asia. He was one of the few natural historians who highlighted the impact of migration, distancing himself from the essentialized vision of autochthonous societies supposedly living in the same territories for centuries, if not millennia. Buffon was also 
interested in cultural change and he did not criticize miscegenation, refusing the common prejudice against mixed-race people.

Prejudices against certain types of human beings are clearly recognizable in Buffon’s writings, particularly concerning the smelly, disingenuous but cheerful black people, the ugly, stupid, and superstitious Lapps, the ceremonious, idle, and dependent Chinese, the strong, civil yet vain Japanese, the fierce, resilient, and rough Tartars, and the promiscuous, superstitious, and bizarre Indians.

Buffon maintained that white was the primordial color of nature, suggesting that the Europeans were the most balanced and perfect of all the human beings because they lived in the temperate region between the latitudes of forty and fifty degrees and reproduced the usual stereotypes against various peoples of the world, especially blacks, Native Americans, and Eskimos, while introducing new ones concerning the peoples of Oceania. Buffon also replicated traditional assumptions against nomadic and seminomadic people, considered vagabonds and thieves. Nevertheless, he recognized the devastating impact of the European conquest on the Native American population, and was inspired by Montaigne’s and Rousseau’s respective visions of the virtuous, innocent savages.

Buffon explicitly questioned the brutal treatment of slaves by European masters. Finally, he defended the concept that all human beings were perfectible and had an overwhelming impact on both researchers and public opinion in Europe and America, but there were visions that competed with his and were disseminated to a wider public. Voltaire, who rightly defined prejudice as an opinion without judgment. 

Kant is another key author who was widely read in Europe and in his writings distinguished four races—white, black, Hunnish (Mongolian or Kalmuckian), and Hindu (or Hindustani)—but underlined the idea that whites and blacks were the two basic races. Whites included Moors from North Africa, Arabs, Turkish-Tartaric peoples, Persians, and Asian peoples not included in other races. Blacks included the natives of sub-Saharan Africa and New Guinea. Huns, also called Kalmuckians, Mongols, or Eleuts, included the pure Koschuts, whose blood was mixed with that of the Tartars in the Torguts and even more so in the Dzungarians. The Hindustani race was considered pure, one of the oldest human races, originating in Tibet, and distinct from the people of the opposite side of the Indian peninsula. We have to keep in mind this early distinction between the pure race of northern India and darker races of the south (though they were not explicitly labeled as such by Kant). 

Kant’s idea was that once a race had taken root and suffocated other “germs,” it would resist transformation and .Kant insisted on the unfailing hereditary differences of races. He reproduced old stereotypes, such as the “strong odour of the Negroes, which cannot be helped through any cleanness.” 

(Hier kan die ou lifebuoy grap as voorbeeld geld)

Herder, whose work had a long-term impact on European philosophical and political thought, did not take up the debate on human races, but he produced a vast work related to the subject, partly based on the philosophy of language.

Herder also essentialized people’s ways of thinking when he considered that barbarian peoples always turned abstractions into mishmash: “What became of Aristotle in the hands of the Arabs?

He did believed in common predispositions shared by all human beings and a shared human capacity for perfectibility—“a single progressive whole” with “a distinctive characteristic plan”—stressing the enormous changes to the earth (its form, surface, and conditions) as well as changes in race, manner of life, manner of thought, form of government, national taste, sensations, and needs.

It was Herder who first formulated in a clear way the principle of cultural relativism when he claimed it was necessary to “leave one’s own time and one’s own people in order to judge remote times and peoples” and analyzed the idea of the barbarian as a watchword of contempt for foreigners who do not speak our language, do not share our ways of thinking and doing, are not our equals in wisdom or bravery, with all this revealing not only ignorance and pride but also insecurity through a rejection of everything that contradicts our manner of thought.

Herder's thinking sowed the seeds for considering different cultures on their own terms, helping to challenge the hierarchies of peoples of the world, although his vision had little impact in his own time.

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) was a physician, anatomist, and anthropologist who taught medicine in Göttingen, and whose publications had a major impact on theories of races.

Blumenbach questioned the arbitrary classifications of human variety and suggested a more complex scheme than Linnaeus’s, underscoring similarities among types across different parts of the world, in line with Buffon’s work. He also stressed the difficulty of marking the boundaries between varieties and accused polygenists of arbitrarily defining differences.

It was in the third edition of his book (1795) that Blumenbach coined the notion of a Caucasian type, inspired by Buffon, explicitly based on aesthetic judgment. This type was placed at the top of a hierarchy and was considered the original —“primeval”—type, and fixed at the center point of a continuum along which the others were placed.

The degeneration of races, a major topic of debate in those days, was used to justify the superior white aesthetic and cultural model, contrasted with the inferior types that had resulted from adaptation to other climates and topographies.

Blumenbach campaigned for the abolition of the slave trade, challenged the notion of savages, met Olaudah Equiano, possessed a library of books by black writers, listed examples of excellent black authors and clergymen, and praised the perfectibility of Africans. He drew extensively on Buffon and contributed to weakening the prejudices about mixed-race people. This very influential author reproduced both old and new ethnic stereotypes about the mental and physical attributes of human types, but he established new methods of observation, discussed racial boundaries, mixed race fertility, and the degeneration and improvement of man placed in nature.

Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) on the other hand argued that there were hereditary configurations of man that constituted different races, the most distinct of all being the white (or Caucasian), the yellow (or Mongolian) and the black (or Ethiopian). 

The first race comprehended most of the civilized and beautiful peoples. The second was supposed to exhibit the same physical features and although capable of creating large empires allowed its civilizations to stagnate.  The third race, which inhabited Africa was defined by black skin, curled hair, a compressed skull and flat nose. Cuvier considered the black race, with its prominent muzzle and thick lips, to be close to apes; the bushman, equated with the Hottentot, was explicitly classified in an intermediate position between the white man and apes. The black ‘peuplades’ (tribes) had remained in a barbarian stage, which suggested permanent handicap.

Cuvier played a crucial role in the racialization of humankind and reinforcement of old prejudices, particularly those concerning the permanent barbarian state of the black Africans and stagnation of Asian civilizations.

A complex political, cultural, and scientific background between the 1820s and 1840s defined the important period for the classification of humans. Setting the stage for Julien Joseph Virey (1775–1846) and his classifications were based on the opposition of white to black: black was considered not just a distinct race but also a different species, since his/her intellectual, behavioral, and physical features did not change with continent, climate, or circumstances.

Virey depicted him as stupid (an adjective he repeated several times), an imitator, just like the monkey, incapable of industry and also accepted Cuvier’s notion that the black human pelvis was close to that of the orangutan, while he maintained that the occipital orifice of black people was set further back than that of whites, which meant that Africans were not upright, bending down in a way that was halfway toward the transverse position of monkeys.

Virey contempt for black people was particularly sharp, but he did not deal any better with Native Americans when it came to their intelligence or ingenuity, while Mongols were classified as pusillanimous and perfidious, bowing to the eternal demands of despotism.

In the second edition of his work, Virey introduced two chapters opposing the slavery of black people.

Although he clearly considered black people inferior, Virey insisted on their perfectibility, perhaps influenced by Blumenbach. He suggested that the unfortunate educational situation and political state of Africa were responsible for blacks’ condition, reversing previous arguments for natural and innate inferiority. These later positions may be attributed to the reaction of the public against the original arguments. 

In the nineteenth century, research concerning the variety of human beings still reflected aspirations toward universal knowledge. The effort to reconcile the developing disciplines of science with an ethnology taking its first serious steps is well represented by Prichard, a prominent medical doctor, Quaker, and committed British citizen engaged in the abolitionist movement. 

Between 1813 and 1847, Prichard published three editions of his major work, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind. He followed Blumenbach on the essential unity of the human species, clear separation between apes and human beings, and perfectibility of Africans. Prichard’s most significant contribution was to depart from Blumenbach’s idea of an original classification of races. For Prichard, race was not a rigid causal category. He accepted innate features as well as the appearance of new ones formed by mutation linked to diversification, differentiation, and diffusion, yet he rejected the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

Like many other liberals of his time, Prichard accepted the idea of the civilize white man as the standard to be attained—with more capacious skulls, finer and more delicate, in general best fitted for the habits of an improved life—against which he set the black African—tougher and coarser, though more perfect in the sensorial organs and able to improve.

This confirms plural and sometimes-contradictory theories of races. It pointed out early challenges to the consistency of such theories, which highlighted blurred and shifting frontiers between categories. Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), a disciple of Blumenbach and one of the major scientific authorities of the first half of the nineteenth century, pushed this criticism further.

Alexander von Humboldt advocated the unity of humankind, citing the many intermediate gradations in skin color and skull forms—gradations that would make it impossible to establish a clear distinction between races. He pointed out that the alleged anatomical contrasts among human beings had disappeared in the face of recent research by Friedrich Tiedemann on the brains of black and white people, or by Vrolik and Weber on the form of the pelvis. According to Humboldt, comparisons of the black populations of Africa, South India, and the west Australian archipelagos had shown no connection between skin color, woolly hair, and cast of countenance.

Humboldt went further than previous authors, denouncing the lack of clear definition in the noun races and instead proposing the use of the expression varieties of human beings. 

He mentioned the five races identified by Blumenbach and seven races suggested by Prichard, but stated that “we fail to recognise any typical sharpness of definition, or any general or well-established principle, in the division of these groups.” Humboldt also observed that several groups could not be included in any category, and that geographic areas could not serve as points of departure for races in any precise way, since several regions had been inhabited at different periods by different groups. In his view, to search for the “cradle of the human race” was to pursue a myth. 

Finally, Humboldt explicitly refused “the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races of men,” and the unhappy Aristotelian doctrine of slavery as an institution condoned by a nature that bestowed unequal rights to freedom on human beings. Humboldt considered that all nations were destined for freedom and (quoting his brother) denounced the erection of barriers among humans to prevent natural perfectibility—the result of prejudice.

The revolutions of 1848 disrupted the new conservative order that had established itself across Europe after Napoléon. This revolutions were the outcome of internal conflicts due to the processes of industrialization, urbanization, intense migration, political recognition of the middle class, and the political demands of the new working class, whose miserable conditions were aggravated by poor harvests and agricultural crisis.

This extraordinary spread of the revolt presented new social and political challenges: while merit still struggled to assert itself against privilege in the new system of values, the struggle for equality against inequality (notions naturally permeated by multiple points of view) became an important issue in the conceptual separation of the new and old social orders. In Europe, reflection on race and the scientific quest for the origins of human variety became a major tool for proving the supposedly inherent, rooted origins of inequality, in order to undermine the powerful movement for equality 
as artificial and antinatural.

The expansion of the British Empire in Asia raised new issues of ideological justification and assertion at different administrative levels (local, regional, and central). The conquest of India and spread of the British Empire in Asia from the 1750s onward established an entirely new relationship between conquerors and dependents. 

Aryanism was used in Europe to promote the idea of a supposedly white imprint stamped on the major civilizations, making sense of contemporary imperial projects, but it was also utilized in Asia by both European and local elites to find a common ground for understanding as well as interaction.

(Hierdie het ek nie in detail aangehaal nie en is dit een aspek wat in groter detail uitgelig kan word en so ook die toestand van die slawe in die "VSA".) 

These three distinct historical contexts—new challenges to social inequality in Europe, racial inequality in the United States, and European imperial dominion in Asia—have never been perceived as together influencing the development of scientific racialism. 

The book Races of Man, published in 1850 by Robert Knox (1791–1862), offers a useful introduction to the scientific racialism that emerged in the 1840s and 1850s in opposition to the humanism of Blumenbach, Prichard, and Humboldt.

According to Knox, races were everything in human history: they were not the result of accident; they were not interchangeable; they represented the laws of hereditary descent in combination with the effects of soil and climate. This essentialist approach —which held that the physical and mental attributes of race were unalterable and refuses the notion of improvement brought about by education or government.

Knox cites the example of the barbarian European in South Africa (Afrikaner), where he served with British troops. Only the best races, which remained in their original environment, would prevail.

The Saxon was the only natural democrat on earth—the only human being who truly understood the meaning of the word liberty —and was tolerant, with an abstract sense of justice, an inordinate self-esteem (and thus a hatred of genius), a love of independence and fair play, and a hatred of dynasties and governments. Knox politically advocated a republican confederation of Saxons in Europe.

Arthur Gobineau (1816–82), who styled himself Comte de Gobineau, published his long Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines in 1853–55, reinforcing the vision of innate and immutable races.

Gobineau was obsessed with the new popular trend of equality; it is not by chance that inequality is at the center of his book’s title. He wanted to prove that inequality was deeply rooted in nature. His project was a history of the world in which the impact of the hierarchy of races would show that some were essentially much more capable than others, countering the “liberal dogma of fraternity,” which assumed “absolute equality of races.”

Gobineau stands in contrast to Tocqueville, a moderate liberal aristocrat who accepted the rise of the masses, future of democratic principles, and suppression of the privilege of birth as inevitable. 

Gobineau maintained an elitist outlook. 

This is why the wise Tocqueville kept his distance from Gobineau after the publication of the book, which Tocqueville described as the product of a horse dealer (maquignon) who wanted to explain everything through differences of race, and criticized as a fatalist view that birth and blood affected entire peoples, comparing it to doctrines of materialism and predestination.

Gobineau did not quote Knox, and his project was not strictly centered on Europe; rather it had a worldwide scope, based on the promotion of Aryans as the white race from central Asia that had supposedly left its imprint on all major civilizations—Hindu, Egyptian, Assyrian, Chinese, Greek, Roman, German, Algonquian, Aztec, and Inca—before retreating to Europe and exerting what was left of its influence in the Anglo-Saxon countries.

In the meantime, in the United States, the measurement of human skulls had been driven by the collection of hundreds of specimens and a new method, now based on cubic capacity, of calculating brain size. 

In his book Crania Americana, published in 1839, Morton distinguished five main categories of human beings—Caucasians, Mongolians, Malays, Americans, and Ethiopians—subdivided into twenty-two families, following an approach close to Blumenbach’s. 

The American Indians were alleged to be incapable of any improvement: slow to acquire knowledge, restless, vengeful, and fond of war, but wholly lacking a spirit of maritime adventure. The Ethiopians (or African people) were considered the lowest grade of humanity, and the Hottentots were the nearest approximation to lower animals.60 Morton’s research confirmed that the Caucasian brain was the biggest, with an average of eighty-seven cubic inches; the American Indian brain reached eighty-two cubic inches; and the African brain measured seventy-eight cubic inches.

These structural features, which supposedly had divided black and white people since before 2000 BC, confirmed his opinion concerning immutable differences among races, which therefore were close to species.

The supposed inferiority of black people distinguishes the US authors of scientific racialism from European writers, who were more interested in justifying inequality among white people. The most pertinent case of this American trend is John Campbell (1810–74), who in 1848 published A Theory of Equality based on lectures he gave on the French Revolution, followed in 1851 by Negro-Mania: Being an Examination of the Fabulous Assumed Equality of the Various Races of Men, and in 1861, Unionists versus Traitors, showing how strongly opposed racialist thought could be to Southern secession. 

He labeled those who defended equality between white, red, and black people as ignorant fanatics, and specifically targeted Prichard as advocating this vision. He asserted the innate inferiority of black people (and nonwhite people in general), refuted the idea of underdevelopment due to white oppression, and asked the usual questions: What has the black race done in five thousand years? Where are monuments in Africa? Where are the law codes? Where are the writers, politicians, scientists, inventors, explorers, and artists?

(Soos onlangs hier gesien was onder een van die briewe hier as kommentaar). 

Josiah Clark Nott (1804–73) in "Types of Mankind or Ethnological Researches, Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Cranes of Races,and upon Their Natural, Geographical, and Biblical History aimed to demonstrate the innate and immutable physical as well as mental features of the different races, based on analyses of mummified skulls and thousand-year-old images. 

The purpose of the volume was clearly defined by one of its contributors, Henry S. Patterson, who indicated the central role played by America in the adaptation of three different races—white, red, and black—now confronted with the immigration of a fourth one (Chinese and Indians). In Patterson’s opinion, the relationships between and management of all these people depended on their intrinsic racial characters. Patterson’s main target was Humboldt and his critical vision of the hierarchies of races, supposedly based on moral judgment rather than physical reality. Nott contested the perfectibility of races, arguing that they had been immutable for four thousand years. The last key member of this group being Louis Agassiz (1807–73). 

Josiah Clark Nott (1804–73) provided the powers in the South with scientific ammunition for political arguments against the abolition of slavery.

Louis Agassiz (1807–73) selected and placed eight races into nature: Arctic, Mongol, European, American, Negro, Hottentot, Malay, and Australian, developing his basic ideas on nature and human races, equating the latter with species, such was the difference he believed to exist between them.

In Agassiz’s vision, Brazil offered a useful example of the sort of mixed-race society that the United States should avoid. 

This was the clear message of A Journey in Brazil.

After the short period of failed Reconstruction based on the idea of human equality, the Jim Crow laws of segregation imposed from 1876 onward reflected the restoration of political white control of the South through blatant violence and daily intimidation. White mobs regularly lynched black people, instigated by semipublic organizations such as the notorious Ku Klux Klan, first active in 1865–74. Black people were effectively disenfranchised, while segregation pervaded daily life in schools, transportation, and public places, reinforced by law.69 Agassiz’s book encapsulates what scientific racialism in the United States was really about: a politically committed development in the theory of races on behalf of southern policies of exclusion, segregation, and discrimination that lasted until the 1960s under the benevolent gaze of northern white pragmatists who shared the same basic racial prejudices.

The impact of Darwin’s work on the explanation of human variety can perhaps be summarized in this way: it placed all humans in nature; it broke from the idea of innate and unchangeable features; and it promoted the concept of evolution by means of natural selection. Darwin certainly contributed to the creation of a new scientific framework—one in which evolution implied a struggle for survival, meaning the decline and massive destruction of the unfit, yet also presupposed the constant improvement of the fittest. This scientific framework imposed an adaptation of prejudices concerning descent and racial constructions. Traditional ideas, such as those of natural slaves along with unchangeable physical and mental features, could no longer be sustained, although ideas of evolving hierarchy, the inferiority of the unfit, and the gap in civilization between sophisticated and rudimentary groups found their way through the new evolutionary system into public discourse.

The debate on human rights stimulated by the American Declaration of Independence and, decisively, French Revolution reverted to the question of who should be entitled to or excluded from citizenship and civil rights. The emergence of democracy, which pushed the decline of multiethnic empires, also had its dark side, since it unleashed intercommunity and international rivalry for the control of territory.

Theories of races were all too present in this period. How did European nationalism integrate notions of race that had previously focused on the peoples of the world? Was there a fusion between race and nation due to their common stress on descent? Where and how did this fusion occur. 

==========

Bogenoemde dan 'n kort oorsig en is veral die laaste paragraaf ook van belang. Nasie, gebied en regte. 'n Debat wat Suid-Afrika vir ongeveer 84 jaar besig gehou het. Voor daar besluit, hierdie is een land met al die verskille wat dit behels. 

Baie dankie

Wouter

NS, hierdie is regtig 'n goeie boek en word sterk aanbeveel.