More on Eric Williams’s “Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery”
I found a piece that expanded on something I wrote in Sustainability Simplified about how racism developed. Since I found that we needed to change culture to restore sustainability, I’ve been learning about abolitionism and related issues, since abolitionism is an example of humans changing global culture where no one thought it possible, then it happened, started by a small number of visionary people.
In my book, I wrote:
Oxford-educated Trinidadian historian Eric Williams wrote, “A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.”
Recently, historian Ibram X. Kendi agreed. He wrote, “I had been taught that racist ideas cause racist policies. That ignorance and hate cause racist ideas. That the root problem of racism is ignorance and hate. But that gets the chain of events exactly wrong. The root problem,” he continued, “has always been the self-interest of racist power. Powerful economic, political, and cultural self-interest . . . has been behind racist policies. Powerful and brilliant intellectuals . . . then produced racist ideas to justify the racist policies.”
I recently read Slavery, Theology, and Anti-Blackness in the Arab World: A Literature Review by Moses E. Ochonu, Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair in History, Professor of African History, Vanderbilt University, in the Research Africa Reviews.
He began by describing his motivation, which is similar to mine: “As a historian, I am interested in accounting for origins and sources. Accordingly, for me, it is important that any effort to understand or explain contemporary anti-Black racism in the Arab world is faithful to the historical processes that produced and normalized that racism. Fortunately, there are sources that we can consult to yield evidence for such historical accounting.” I am interested in the forces that led to racism, as well as our other problems these days, and I don’t stop at phenomenological descriptions as explaining causality.
Ochonu expanded on what I wrote:
Historian Eric Williams’ argument in Capitalism and Slavery that Atlantic slavery produced racism and not the other way around is now axiomatic in Atlantic slavery studies, and was amplified by Edmund Morgan’s 1975 work, American Slavery, American Freedom. The simple meaning of this postulation is that, from the perspective of enslavers, once the Atlantic slave trade commenced, enslavement authorized and necessitated a justificatory ideology and associated statutory instruments for enslaving Africans. Racism, anchored in religious claims and on the production of devaluing sociological and ethnological knowledge about Africans, provided that justification; a defense that was then codified in law and bureaucratic practice. Ideas of racial superiority and inferiority were invented and enunciated and over time became part of the social and intellectual fabric of the enslaving societies. Social attitudes of anti-Blackness followed as this slavery-induced racism became normalized and as people growing up in those societies became socialized into the popular anti-Black racist tropes of their societies.
I would argue that this explanation for the historical evolution of racism applies to anti-Blackness in the Arab world as well. Much like in the Euro-Atlantic context, the contention is not that Arabs have always been racist against Black Africans. The point rather is that, once the Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades took root along with their economic benefits and complementing sociological norms, there was a persistent need not just for generating but also for reinforcing the racial justifications for them. This, as in the later Atlantic case, required the production of religious, sociological, and ethnological knowledge on a vast scale to bolster claims of Arab superiority and Black inferiority.
More enlightening history
I kept reading past just the early quotes relevant to what I learned from Williams. I hope Ochonu doesn’t mind my quoting him at length, but his history of another huge tradition of slavery—in the tens of millions enduring more than a millennium—illuminates about the transatlantic one most Americans know about. Regular readers know I’m in the middle of reading about another tradition of slavery The Gulag Archipelago.
I find what I quote below fascinating. It’s relevant to my work and looks relevant to understanding our culture.
I should note that the publisher doesn’t seem to peer review work, but it’s based in Duke University, which seems to have a solid academic reputation.
The rest of his paper had interesting information that helps illustrate how racism develops. To think it’s just something one group did doesn’t explain why that group would be different if there’s no biological basis to race. Ochonu continued:
Long before the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade and its imbrication in post-Enlightenment white supremacy, Arab philosophers, geographers, and travelers wrote extensive commentaries on Black African societies and kingdoms they observed. These writings are filled with the casual, normalized anti-Black racism that are today commonplace in the Arab world.
Ibn Khaldun was arguably the most respected and influential Arab philosopher and scholar of the Middle Ages. Yet his (reference) characterization of African societies repeated the prevalent popular Arab descriptions of Africans as excitable, emotional, dirty, morally unclean, childlike, and, to use his own words, “worse than dogs.” His many racist views on Africans are distilled in this one excerpt from his magnum opus, The Muqaddimah:
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. They are everywhere described as stupid. . . . Beyond [the Sahel] to the south there is no civilization in the proper sense. There are only humans who are closer to dumb animals than to rational beings. They live in thickets and caves, and eat herbs and unprepared grain. They frequently eat each other. They cannot be considered human beings.
Ibn Khaldun saw the enslavement of Africans as a logical outgrowth of their childlike docility. Africans, he argued, were suited to slavery: Therefore, the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because [Negroes] have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals, as we have stated.
Other Arab and Persian writers with intellectual influence in the Arab world spewed racist characterizations of Africans that mirrored the popularly held views in their own societies about Africans as savages and sub-human entities. Here are a few samples from this menu of Arab racist intellectual production on Africa:
Of the neighbors of the Bujja, Maqdisi had heard that “there is no marriage among them; the child does not know his father, and they eat people—but God knows best. As for the Zanj, they are people of black color, flat noses, kinky hair, and little understanding or intelligence (Maqdisi, also known as Al-Muqaddasi (fl. 966 CE), Kitab al-Bad’ wa-Tarikh, vol. 4)
If (all types of men) are taken, from the first, and one placed after another, like the Negro from Zanzibar, in the southernmost countries, the Negro does not differ from an animal in anything except the fact that his hands have been lifted from the earth—in no other peculiarity or property—except for what God wished. Many have seen that the ape is more capable of being trained than the Negro, and more intelligent. (Philosopher-theologian Nasir al-Din Tusi (1201–74), Tasawwurat (Rawdat al-Taslim))
What we see in these textual anti-Black racisms is that they reflected and reinforced
existing anti-Black attitudes in the natal societies of the writers. Institutions and structures in those
societies policed this racial hierarchy and reinforced anti-Blackness.
As Eric Williams noted the direction between racism and slavery was backward from what most people thought, so Ochonu describes the flow of racism between Christians and Muslims:
On one hand, the writings remarked positively on African natural resources such as gold. On the other hand, they unleashed a maelstrom of textual dehumanization on Africans. Africans emerge in these texts as rich in natural resources but culturally deficient. The trope of backward, primitive, childlike but naturally endowed Africans did not begin with European racists. It began with racist Arab writers. This ambivalent bromide of dehumanization and resource-focused backhanded compliment was amplified to new decibels in the period of the European encounter with Africa, beginning in the fifteenth century.
There is a related point worth making here. the Hamitic myth, which holds that Black Africans are a cursed race and that any civilizational accomplishments recorded in Africa south of the Sahara were spearheaded by light-skinned people from North Africa and the Greater Middle East; this idea was first developed in pre-Islamic Middle East and thereafter the Islamic Middle East before it made its way to European Christian and secular colonial racist thought
He continued:
The chain of ideational transmission led from Arab Muslim sources to European Christian ones, not the other way around. In fact, in the Middle Ages, there was a discernible philosophical and ideational borrowing and secular scriptural seepage from Arab worldviews into European philosophical works. The massive translations of Arabic theological, philosophical, and other texts into Latin and the popularity of Arab philosophers such as al-Fārābī among European thinkers resulted in a dynamic in which ideas and ways of understanding the world beyond Europe flowed from Arabs to Europeans. The myth of Black inferiority and claims about Africans’ congenital backwardness made its way, as Evans shows, from Jewish texts to Arab Muslim ones, acquiring, as it traveled, multiple new racist strands.
He clarifies that he’s not trying to implicate Arabs or Muslims. The development of racism follows from dominance hierarchy, as I see it. He writes:
It is common knowledge that Christian theological claims, including paradigmatic ones, were deployed to justify the enslavement of Africans; and they were subsequently invoked to justify racism and discrimination against the descendants of the enslaved and free black populations in the Americas. Similarly, European Christian colonizers and ideologues of the non-pretentiously racist apartheid system found Christian theology to be a productive site for mining both moralistic and religious idioms for justifying their ideology.
In India, Hindu texts are replete with and provide virulent scripts of othering, negative differentiation, and dehumanization whose primary targets are so-called untouchables, Black citizens. South Asian anti-Blackness derives from Hindu (and some Muslim) theological wellsprings with a deep ideological genealogy. In the Hindu canon, the Rg Veda, one of the oldest of the Puranic texts birthed the Varna system, out of which emerged aspects of the racialized practice of untouchability.
He even clarifies that racism happened within Africa, an outcome that contradicts mainstream understandings of racism but makes sense when you understand it as resulting from dominance hierarchy, which results when a necessary resource can be controlled with no alternative, not because of someone’s skin color:
Some ideologies of negative differentiation and devaluation have roots in traditional African religious texts that are unwritten but are no less potent as conveyors of processes of oppression and harmful exclusion. Since I study Nigeria, let me advance two examples of traditional religious ideologies of othering and inferiorization from that country. The first example is the Osu caste system among the Igbo of South Eastern Nigeria. As Elijah Obinna (2012) shows, this system is rooted in the Igbo traditional religious idea of certain people being inadmissible to mainstream society because they or their ancestors were offered up as servants and guardians to deities.
The second example comes from the Higi of Northeastern Nigeria. There, blacksmiths and their descendants are treated as outcasts and second-class citizens, marginal to mainstream society. This mechanism of devaluation is rooted in Higi traditional religion, which regards blacksmithing as a sacred, esoteric, and dangerous vocation whose practitioners should not contaminate members of Higi society. The belief in the uncleanness of blacksmiths emanates from their vocation’s active existence at the complementary intersections of the spiritual and the artisanal (Podlweski, 1985; Vaughan 1970; van Beek 1992).
I have engaged in this analogizing analysis in order to illustrate how Islam was not and could not have been an outlier in the ubiquitous production of religiously-legitimized rhetoric and practices of racism, dehumanization, and othering.
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