In the course of the 1700s, White Americans read their social order into the natural order. After all, it was not they who made Black people into slaves, into a degraded race – Blacks were just born that way. They were not capable of much more! Thus the rise of scientific racism in the late 1700s.
By 1700, White American thought leaders were stereotyping Blacks as:
- different looking in skin colour, hair and lips,
- disagreeable in smell,
- being like monkeys,
- unintelligent,
- uncivilized, alien, foreign,
- immoral, dangerous, given to crime,
- lazy,
- oversexed,
- ungrateful, rebellious,
- having disorganized families.
These were mostly warmed-over stereotypes about the Irish, which were applied to Blacks once Whites became dependent on their labour. The colonies of Virginia and Georgia would have failed but for Black slave labour. Presumably the other southern colonies would have failed too.
By 1723, the law (made by and for the rich) had firmly divided the poor into free Whites and Black slaves. Being born to a slave meant you yourself were born a slave, even if you had a parent who was White or free. Slavery was hereditary and lifelong. That will shape the sort of arguments required to defend slavery.
In 1748, Montesquieu noted:
“It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians.”
The late 1700s saw the rise of abolitionism, the movement to abolish and get rid of slavery, led by the embarrassingly few Christians with a functioning conscience, mostly Quakers and people with unfashionable religious enthusiasms, like William Wilberforce. That made it necessary to come up with, gasp, actual arguments to defend slavery and the racism it was built on. Science and religion dutifully did their part to defend the inhumanity of the rich and powerful. Their two most notable arguments:
- The Curse of Ham – Blacks were cursed by the Old Testament god to be servants for ever. It is God’s will. The Bible says so in Genesis 9:20-27! At least if you misinterpret it correctly.
- Racial inferiority – Blacks belonged to a separate “race” of man. Whites were “a little lower than the angels”, while Black women mated with – orangutans. It was their place in the Great Chain of Being, as later proved by science!
By 1758, Linnaeus was saying stuff like this in his best academic Latin:
Homo sapiens afer: Black [skin], phlegmatic, lazy. Dark hair, with many twisting braids; silky skin; flat nose; swollen lips; Women [with] elongated labia; breasts lactating profusely. Sly, sluggish, neglectful. Anoints himself with fat. Governed by choice [caprice].
From 1735 to 1756 he merely noted the skin colour and place of origin of Homo sapiens afer. Now he was adding inborn behaviours, like laziness, and giving it the stamp of sober science.
By 1776, Thomas Jefferson, slave owner, a Founding Father of the US, and the thinking man’s racist, would take it further and push the idea that Blacks were born with a lack of intelligence. “A suspicion only,” he said in 1787, one that required further scientific investigation. Enter scientific racism, which would reach its full flower in the 1800s and early 1900s.
– Abagond, 2021.
Sources: Google Images, linnean.org; “Race in North America” (2012) by Audrey and Brian D. Smedley; “The White Racial Frame” (2010) by Joe R. Feagin.
See also:
- White American racism in the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, 1900s, 2000s.
- Views on Black people:
- 1700: White racial frame
- 1728: Chambers’s Cyclopaedia
- 1765: Diderot’s Encyclopédie
- 1787: Jefferson – he was a “complex man”
- William Wilberforce
- Linnaeus
- The Curse of Ham
- The term “race”
- scientific racism
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@ Abagond
“These were warmed-over stereotypes about the Irish”
I’m familiar with all of these except: “different looking in skin colour … and lips”
I left out “hair” because that stereotype I’m familiar with. Red hair was connected to being oversexed and quick to anger, unruly, unable to control the baser instincts.
But skin color and lips, that’s surprising. Do you have any details?
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@ Abagond
Wow, I’m perplexed because you seem to be caught by surprise with this attitude!
Remember Karl Marx saying that “The dominant ideology is the ideology of the dominant class” where, by dominant ideology it is understood, “dominant ideology denotes the attitudes, beliefs, values, and morals shared by the majority of the people in a given society. As a mechanism of social control, the dominant ideology frames how the majority of the population thinks about the nature of society, their place in society, and their connection to a social class.”
Cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_ideology
This is truth regardless of society.
Once in power a ruling class – every ruling class – makes sure that everybody believes that that social order is the better one, the more natural one.
If Blacks were in a so bad position during slavery in the Americas, well, guess, “they were born to be slaves”. Everything explained. No need to be judgmental about that specific social order. Bingo!
I you want further examples of that, think about:
— The Hindu religion and its relationship to the conquerors of the Indian sub-continent millennia ago. That religion clearly served the purpose of maintaining the peculiar social order emerging from that conquest. The fact that that social order (caste system) was able to perpetuates itself for so long, is a testimony of the power of its underlying ideology.
— The concept of colonization as an attempt to civilize peoples, was also a powerful ideology. I remember clearly that when I was a kid, my ideal in life was to become as civilized as possible. No question asked, at that time, about the nature of the colonial system.
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@ Solitaire
Sorry. My mistake. I should have said “mostly” warmed-over stereotypes about the Irish. I updated the post.
The Irish were stereotyped as looking different, even apelike, but not necessarily in regard to lips and skin colour.
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Update: I added “Women without shame” to Linnaeus’s 1758 description of Black people. It appears in the Latin but not in the Linnean Society’s English translation that I used.
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@ munubantu
I am perplexed that you think I am perplexed. I EXPECT the dominant ideology to make the social order seem right and good, no matter how crooked it is. That is what racism is all about. BUT among scholars there is a chicken-and-egg sort of debate about which came first historically – racism or a racist social order.
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@ Abagond
“Sorry. My mistake.”
Not necessarily. More like my misreading, or reading too much into it.
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“Women without shame, [with] elongated labia; breasts lactating profusely.”
Hmm. The lengths some people will go to scapegoat captive women. Somehow it is the victims of “intimate violence” who are “without shame”, not the criminals who violated them on a routine basis.
Go figure.
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I’ve been googling around, and it looks like there’s some question about how to translate “Feminis sinus pudoris.”
It’s been widely translated as “women without shame,” but sometimes as “women with elongated labia.”
My Latin is rusty, but I believe “without” should be sine. I suppose Linnaeus could have made a mistake with the ending. On the other hand, sinus can be translated as: lap, fold, curved surface, purse, pocket.
Pudoris does mean “shame,” but it’s possible that sinus pudoris together meant something like “folds of shame” or “shameful folds.”
Sinus pudoris still appears to be used medically to refer to elongated labia minora, but I have been unable to find out if this usage predates Linnaeus.
Of course, even if Linnaeus was talking solely about a physical attribute, he still was incorrect in applying it to only one race, and to all the women of that race.
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So I did find a source that predates Linnaeus, via Google Books, in the 1682 edition of The Anatomy of Humane [sic] Bodies by Thomas Gibson.
Gibson lists sinus pudoris as one of the parts of female reproductive anatomy, defining it in English as “the outer Privity.”
He’s giving the Latin term a somewhat different and more generalized definition, but it still demonstrates that this was terminology for female external genitalia.
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@ Solitaire
Thank you!!! It did look like “without shame” to me in the Latin, especially since I am not up on anatomical Latin. But, yes, sinus would be a noun or adjective not a preposition.
I corrected the text here and in the post on Linnaeus.
I am relieved the mistake was mine and not the Linnean Society’s. They are supposed to be the experts, after all. But I did not trust them to NOT sanitize Linnaeus.
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@ Abagond
“I am relieved the mistake was mine”
It’s not your mistake. It’s all over the internet, and not just that Wiki translation or blogs but in scholarly journals and quotes from academic books. It definitely predates the internet, because I found a couple references to when Stephen Jay Gould tried to correct it back in 1984.
It must have gotten mistranslated in an early and/or widely used English translation, to be so prevalent.
What made me curious is when I was looking at the Latin (which I only did because of the “browny” typo from Wiki on the post about Linnaeus), I noticed that there was just the one phrase, Feminis sinus pudoris, but two different translations.
“especially since I am not up on anatomical Latin”
I’m not, either. I was lucky to stumble across the occurrence in Gibson. I wonder if someone has ever traced the historical usage of that term in medical literature.
“…and not the Linnean Society’s. They are supposed to be the experts, after all. But I did not trust them to NOT sanitize Linnaeus.”
I understand. I was somewhat wary about whether to share what I had found because I didn’t want anyone to think I was trying to sanitize him, either.
I wonder if the Linnean Society has ever addressed this particular question over the differing translations. It seems like it would have warranted at least an explanatory footnote in their essay about race (the one you linked to).
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