THE HISTORY OF THE IDEA OF RACE… AND WHY IT

MATTERS(Excerpt)

Audrey Smedley
The position taken by many anthropologists, both biological and
social, and increasingly many other scholars in the social sciences is that
“race is a cultural construct.” It should be clear that this is not a definition
or even a characterization of “race,” but an assertion about the scholarly or
existential domain in which we can best examine and explain the
phenomenon of race. Race should be analyzed as a social/cultural reality
that exists in a realm independent of biological or genetic variations. No
amount of research into the biophysical or genetic features of individuals
or groups will explain the social phenomenon of race. When five white
policemen shot a young unarmed African immigrant 41 times in the
doorway of his New York apartment, this can’t be explained by examining
their genes or biology. Nor can we explain employer preferences for white
job applicants or discrimination in housing or any other of the social
realities of racism by references to human biological differences.
This does not mean that we deny that there is a biological basis for
some human behaviors at the individual level which is a perfectly legitimate
perspective for those who are engaged in this kind of research. Nor does it
mean that the existence of race as a cultural phenomenon has no impact on
the biology of human beings. On the contrary we know a lot about the
sometimes devastating effects of race and racism on the biology and
behavior of individuals and groups. Because of several hundred years of
racism, during which both physical and psychological oppression have
characterized the lives and environments of those people seen as members
of low status races, differences in health status and life styles among them
have appeared and continue to impact all of us.
 The significance of History. In the middle of the 20th century, a
new generation of historians began to take another look at the
beginnings of the American experience. They spent decades exploring
all of the original documents relating to the establishment of colonies
in America. What these scholars discovered was to transform the
writing of American history forever. Their research revealed that our
19th and 20th century ideas and beliefs about races did not in fact exist
in the 17th century. Race originated as a folk idea and ideology about
human differences; it was a social invention, not a product of science.
Historians have documented when, and to a great extent, how race as
an ideology came into our culture and our consciousness. This is the
story that I will briefly tell here. (One of the first of the publications
and perhaps the one with the greatest impact was a book by Edmund
Morgan entitled, American Slavery, American Freedom [1975]. It is
the detailed story of Virginia, the first successful colony. On its
publication it was hailed as a classic that has inspired numerous other
historians.)
The establishment of Jamestown in Virginia by English colonists
occurred 400 years ago this year, in 1607. From the beginning, Jamestown
was a crude, rough, and turbulent community of mostly young Englishmen
who came to seek their fortunes and return home. They planned to emulate
the Spanish; to obtain wealth by conquering and enslaving the native
peoples, and forcing them to produce gold and silver. However, the Indians
didn’t take well to slavery; many died of European diseases and others
escaped to unknown territories. Also there was no gold and silver
immediately available; but settlers soon discovered a crop, tobacco, whose
trade would bring them wealth.
But growing and processing tobacco required very hard work. The
greatest problem the colonists constantly faced was lack of labor; many
settlers would not or could not do such intensive work. Within a decade, the
colony began to import indentured servants, mostly from England, and it
was this pattern of servitude that provided a model for the slavery that was
to come later. Servants were bought and sold, ill-fed, ill-clothed, and poorly-
housed. They were punished cruelly for petty crimes. Mortality was high,
but the surplus poor emigrating from England in the early 17th century had
few choices. If they survived the period of debenture, usually 4-7 years in
the New World, they could be set free, allowed to acquire land and servants,
and to make their fortunes for themselves. However, there were many
degrees of servitude; and most did not survive.
In 1619, the first Africans arrived. There has been some debate about
who they were, but we know that they had Spanish or Portuguese names
and were already familiar with European culture. In the US it is widely and
popularly believed that the colonists brought Africans to the New World as
slaves from the beginning and that Europeans were “naturally” prejudiced
toward Africans because of their physical characteristics, specifically dark
skin. Historians now hold that true slavery did not exist in the early decades
of the English North American colonies. Englishmen were unfamiliar with
the institution. They saw their society as a free one, based on free labor,
and believed that English laws had terminated all forms of slavery centuries
before their arrival in the Americas. But they were familiar with many
forms of bond servitude which they saw as unfree labor, and some men
who purchased headrights to laborers treated them as if they were slaves
for life. Masters were often brutal; they flogged servants for disobedience,
or cut off their ears, or put skewers through their tongues. But the settlers
were also callous and cruel toward one another. Often servants were called
slaves, and a distinction between servitude and slavery was not at all clear.
Consequently, the first Africans who arrived in Jamestown were not
initially or uniformly perceived as slaves. They were assimilated into the
colony as laborers under varying contracts like those of Europeans. Some
Africans worked off their debts and became freedmen. A few ambitious men
obtained land and livestock, built substantial houses, married, and
established themselves as well-to-do planters. Some became entrepreneurs
and engaged in trading and other commercial activities and had business
dealings on an equal footing with whites. One famous family, that of
Anthony Johnson and his two sons owned more than 440 acres of land; they
also had headrights for, (that is, owned) three Africans, three Europeans and
two Indians as servants. They exercised the same rights as propertied
Europeans. They participated in the assembly, the governing body of the
colony, voted, served on juries, and socialized with white planters. Like
their white counterparts, free black property owners were often
contemptuous of government, arrogant and insulting toward those
considered their social inferiors, assertive of their rights, and prone to
fighting. In fact, numerous court records provide clear evidence that these
17th century Africans did not act differently from whites of the same social
class.
Edmund Morgan wrote, “There is more than a little evidence that
Virginians during these years were ready to think of Negroes as members
or potential members of the community on the same terms as other men
and to demand of them the same standards of behavior. Black men and
white serving the same master worked, ate, and slept together, and
together shared in escapades, escapes, and punishments”. “It was common
for servants and slaves to run away together, steal hogs together, get
drunk together. It was not uncommon for them to make love together”.
No stigma was associated with what we today call intermarriages.
Black men servants often married white women servants. Records from one
county reveal that one fourth of the children born to European servant girls
were mulatto (Breen and Ennis 1980). Historian Anthony Parent (2003)
notes that five out often black men on the Eastern Shore were married to
white women. One servant girl declared to her master that she would rather
marry a Negro slave on a neighboring plantation than him with all of his
property, and she did. Given the demographics, servant girls had their
choice of men. One white widow of a black farmer had no problem with
remarrying, this time to a white man. She later sued this second husband,
accusing him of squandering the property she had accumulated with her
first husband. In another case, a black women servant sued successfully for
her freedom and then married the white lawyer who represented her in
court.
By mid-century, the colony was in a crisis. A few men from among
the earliest settlers had taken over most of the fertile land; they had
established large plantations and grew tobacco to make huge fortunes. Poor
servants who achieved their freedom found it difficult to acquire land. The
freed poor and servants, which now included Europeans, Africans,
mulattoes, and a few Indians, became unhappy with their lot and especially
the corruption and abuse of power on the part of wealthy men who ruled the
colony. They threatened rebellions, plundered their neighbors, showed
contempt for colony leaders, and generated unrest throughout the settlement.
In 1676, the most famous rebellion took place. Led by Nathaniel
Bacon, this uprising of thousands of poor workers was the first major
threat to social stability. The rebellion dissipated after the death of Bacon,
but British royal commissioners sent out to suppress the uprising realized
that the population at large had supported the rebellion and were “sullen
and obstinate.” On one occasion they faced a dissatisfied rabble of “400
African and 600 or 700 European bond laborers, chiefly Irish” . They soon
recognized the need for a stratagem to prevent such occurrences in the
future and ensure that a sufficient number of controlled laborers were
made available to plantation owners.
The decisions that the rulers of the colony made during the last
decades of the 17th century and the first quarter of the 18 th century resulted
in the establishment of racial slavery. They began to pass a series of laws
separating out Africans and their descendants, restricting their rights and
mobility, and imposing a condition of permanent slavery on them. Africans
were now being brought directly from Africa. They were different from
earlier Africans in that they were heathens, that is, not Christians, and were
unfamiliar with European languages, customs, and traditions. Some colony
leaders began to argue that Africans had no rights under British laws and
therefore could be subject to forced labor with impunity. After 1672, British
ships entered the slave trade and the numbers of people shipped directly
across the Atlantic greatly increased.
There were critical reasons for the preference for Africans. As early as
the 1630s, planters had expressed a desire for African laborers (“If only we
had some Africans!”). Records of plantation owners in the Caribbean and in
the colonies of Virginia and Maryland reveal the fact that Africans were
initially considered a civilized and docile people who had knowledge of and
experience with tropical cultivation. They were accustomed to discipline,
one of the hallmarks of civilized behavior, as well as working cooperatively
in groups. They knew how to grow corn, tobacco, sugar cane, and cotton in
their native lands; these crops were unknown in Europe. And many Africans
had knowledge of metal work, carpentry, cattle-keeping, brick-making,
weaving, leather tanning, and many other skills. Colonists soon realized that
without Africans, their enterprises would fail. They often wrote, “We cannot
survive without Africans!”
A good example is the history of the colony of Georgia, in the mid-
18th century. This colony was founded (1732) by followers of John Wesley
(founder of Methodism) with the objective of settling here poor people from
Europe. The founders and organizers had an anti-slavery policy and Georgia
became the first non-slaveholding colony. But the experiment failed; the
settlers endured hunger, disease, poverty, and many deaths. They soon
petitioned the trustees to alter the policy and to allow slaves. They argued
that they could not survive without African slaves. Nearly twenty years after
the founding, the act prohibiting slavery was repealed and Georgia began to
prosper.
Although there were more Irish slaves in the Caribbean Isles than
Africans, those peoples captured in wars with the English, knew nothing
about tropical agriculture and were seen as “savages,” (they had a
“dangerous nature”) (see Smedley 2007). They often ran away to join their
co-religionists, the catholic Spanish, and were considered a “rebellious lot.”
Historian Leonard Liggio, quoted from one letter sent to traders by a
planter, “Don’t send us any more Irish; send us some Africans, for the
Africans are civilized and the Irish are not”.
In contrast to Indians, Africans also had natural immunities to Old
World diseases. European colonists recognized that Africans lived longer
and were able to produce more than Europeans who had a high mortality
rate. Moreover, Africans were in a strange land with no powerful allies and,
unlike the Indians, could not escape to familiar territories. They were the
most vulnerable of all the peoples of the Americas.
Sources of English servants began to decline in the latter part of the
17th century, as jobs became available at home. The slave trade to Africa
increased as internal warfare in Africa made more and more people
available for enslavement. Leaders of the colonies, all large planters, had
two objectives: to impose effective social controls over the population and
provide themselves with cheap and easily controlled workers. They readily
perceived that they could use the differing physical characteristics of the
population to divide them and demarcate some for permanent slavery.
Historian Anthony Parent (2003) argues that a powerful planter class,
acting to further its own economic interests, deliberately brought a new
form of servitude, racial slavery to Virginia over the period of 1690-1723.
In this period, hundreds of laws were passed restricting the rights of
Africans and their descendents. By 1723, even free Negroes were
prohibited from voting.
 Colonial leaders were also doing something else; they were laying the
basis for the invention of race and racial identities. They began to
homogenize all Europeans, regardless of ethnicity, status, or social class,
into a new category. The first time the term “White,” rather than “Christian”
or their ethnic names (English, Irish, Scots, Portuguese, German, Spanish,
Swede) appeared in the public record was seen in a law passed in 1691 that
prohibited the marriage of Europeans with Negroes, Indians, and mulattoes .
A clearly separated category of Negroes as slaves allowed newly freed
European servants opportunities to realize their ambitions and to identify
common interests with the wealthy and powerful. Laws were passed
offering material advantages and social privileges to poor whites. In this
way, colony leaders consciously contrived a social control mechanism to
prevent the unification of the working poor. Physical features became
markers of racial (social) status, as Virginia’s governor William Gooch
asserted, the assembly sought to “fix a perpetual Brand upon Free Negroes
and Mulattos”.
However, the earliest rationale for racial slavery was not differences
in physical features, but the identification of Africans as uncivilized
heathens. The first “savages” that English had created in their minds were
the “wild Irish.” In the late 16th century, after centuries of conflict and
brutal warfare with the Irish, Queen Elizabeth declared that the Irish were
natural “savages” incapable of civilization. Such attitudes generated
extreme hatred of the Irish that has continued into the 21st century. In fact,
the Elizabethans came very near to racializing the Irish, and in the 18th
century the term “race” was imposed on the Irish.
Native Americans became “savages” when they resisted English
appropriation of their lands, but this image began to change in the late 18th
cent. Now, early in the 18th century, by reducing Africans to permanent
slavery, prohibiting owners from freeing slaves, prohibiting their education
and training, the English invented a new savage. From the early 18th
century on, negative characterizations of Africans formed part of a new
rationalization for enslavement. These became the stereotypes of races and
race differences that we inherited in the 19h and 20th centuries. What
colony leaders were doing was establishing unequal groups and imposing
different social meanings on them. As they were creating the institutional
and behavioral aspects of slavery, the colonists were simultaneously
structuring the ideological components of race. They exaggerated human
differences and even invented some that could not be sustained empirically,
such as the belief that Negroes had black brains and blood.
By the end of the 18th century, during the Revolutionary era, a great
debate over the nature of “the Negro” had developed. Anti-slavery forces,
particularly in Europe, castigated the leaders of the American Revolution
for advocating freedom, yet holding more than two million people
enslaved. In response, pro-slavery proponents developed an ideology about
human group differences that dehumanized “the Negro” and demoted him
to a status closer to the apes. Thomas Jefferson was the first to proclaim
that we should leave the question of the Negro’s status in nature to science,
which was just beginning to emerge as a separate and distinct institution in
Western culture. From the last decade of the 18th century on, the writings
of learned men appeared to proclaim the natural inferiority of blacks.
In the 1860s, slavery ended, but “race” as social status and the basis
of our human identities remained. Race ideology proclaimed the existence
of separate, distinct, and exclusive groups that were made unequal by God
or nature. African-Americans, the most inferior, were at the bottom of the
hierarchy, European whites (some of them) were at the top. Each race was
thought to have distinct physical and behavioral traits that were inherited
“in the blood,” and passed on to their children. Thus, we have the
continuing stereotype of African-Americans as lacking in intelligence, lazy,
overly-sexed, loud, irrational, musical, emotional, and superstitious. Finally,
it was believed that these race differences could not be transcended or
transformed.

In the 19th century, “science” using techniques of measuring various