Re: IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR PEOPLE RUNNING TRUNK re: [Bug 7826] Improve language around whitelist/blacklist and master/slave

[sh...@shanew.net]

On Tue, 14 Jul 2020, Martin Gregorie wrote:

> I notice that the abstract you quoted has no references earlier than
> 1962, so I find it hard to take it seriously, especially as the earlier
> religious links between 'black' and 'sin' appear to be ignored by it.
> This is odd considering how much influence religion had on society in
> the 17th century and that there was no slavery in North America before
> about 1640.

That last bit is plain wrong.  Jamestown had Africans as slaves as early
as 1619, but the Spanish were even earlier, having brought slaves on
an expedition to present-day South Carolina in 1526 (slaves who then
rebelled and essentially destroyed the settlement's ability to
survive).
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/misguided-focus-1619-beginning-slavery-us-damages-our-understanding-american-history-180964873/

As for the influence of religion at this time, surely you're aware of
Biblical defenses of racism and slavery, whether in the form of the
"curse of Ham" or the suggestion that slavery was a necessary evil
because it would control the sinful, less humane, black race.

Furthermore, even if "black" and "sin" are linked prior to the use of
black as racist, this does not diminish the reality that "white"
racist views of "black" people are long-standing.  And, as pure
conjecture, if European Christians associated black with sin and evil,
it's not much of a leap to suggest these associations suggested or
strengthened their racist views of black people as lazy (Sloth),
capricious (Greed) and lustful (Lust), among other negative qualities.


> Out of pure curiosity, when was the current racist use of 'black' first
> coined and where did that happen?

While there are earlier uses of the term "black" referring to
darker-skinned people, it most directly comes to us via the European
Enlightment, and it was racist from the start.  The quick version is
that various "natural philosophers" in the late 1600s tried to
describe and account for the different "races" that they encountered
in the world.  One famous account is from François Bernier, entitled
"New Division of the Earth by the Different Species or 'Races' of Man
that Inhabit It."
https://web.archive.org/web/20060524134126/http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/bindon/ant275/reader/bernier.PDF
Bernier doesn't explicitly classify these groups into color in this
piece, but he does say " if a black African pair be transported to a
cold country, their children are just as black, and so are all their
descendants until they come to marry with white women."  Additionally,
he describes their hair as "not properly hair, but rather a species of
wool, which comes near the hairs of some of our dogs".  Just an
example of how the "other" is not proper, but rather is animalistic.

For explicit connection between race and color, as well as clear
expressions of white racial superiority, we have Carl Linnaeus to
thank.  In the first edition of Systema Naturae, from 1735, he
classififed humans into four subgroups or "varieties" of human species
(later expanded to five), and by the 1758 version these were
specifically associated with color: White (Europeanus), Yellow
(Asiaticus), Black (Africanus), and Red (Americanus).
https://www.nature.com/articles/447028a

To say his descriptions of these "species" feels oddly familiar in our
modern world would be an understatement:

Africanus is desribed as "black, phlegmatic, relaxed; black, frizzled
hair; silky skin, flat nose, tumid lips; females without shame;
mammary glands give milk abundantly; crafty, sly, lazy, cunning,
lustful, careless; anoints himself with grease; and governed by
caprice."

Europeanus, on the other hand, is described as "white, sanguine,
browny; with abundant, long hair; blue eyes; gentle, acute, inventive;
covered with close vestments; and governed by laws."

These are the beginnings of scientific racism, and while it's mostly
rejected these days, it still has modern proponents.  Wikipedia has a
good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

Another interesting scientific debate that reveals racism in the
European Enlightenment (and the history of science, lest we think of
it and it's cousin technology somehow innocent of racism)) is
monogenism vs polygenism and the theory of degeneration that the
monogenists posited to explain the differences in race and ethinicity.
The jist of it is that "white" people reflect the "normal" state of
man, and other races have degenerated based on environmental and
climate differences around the world.  Moved to a more temperate
climate, Georges-Louis Buffon suggested, a black person from Senegal
would eventually return to his "normal" white, blonde and blue-eyed
state.  Clearly wrong, but also clearly racist.  And it wasn't some
fringe belief.  The likes of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, while
dissagreeing with Buffon that someone could return to "normal" just by
moving to a different climate, agreed that "the Negroes, and in
general all the other species of men [are] naturally inferior to the
whites" (Hume) or that "the Negroes of Africa have by nature no
feeling that rises above the trifling"
https://books.google.com/books?id=eem1AQAAQBAJ&pg=PA9&lpg=PA9#v=onepage&q&f=false


-- 
Public key #7BBC68D9 at            |                 Shane Williams
http://pgp.mit.edu/                |      System Admin - UT CompSci
=----------------------------------+-------------------------------
All syllogisms contain three lines |              shanew@shanew.net
Therefore this is not a syllogism  | www.ischool.utexas.edu/~shanew

Re: IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR PEOPLE RUNNING TRUNK re: [Bug 7826] Improve language around whitelist/blacklist and master/slave

[Martin Gregorie <ma...@gregorie.org>]

On Tue, 2020-07-14 at 16:50 -0500, shanew@shanew.net wrote:
> That last bit is plain wrong.  Jamestown had Africans as slaves as
> early as 1619, 
>
Fair enough - I was ignoring the Spanish because it seems to me,
possibly wrongly, that what they did in that sphere had little influence
on the English-speaking world.
 
> As for the influence of religion at this time, surely you're aware of
> Biblical defenses of racism and slavery, whether in the form of the
> "curse of Ham" or the suggestion that slavery was a necessary evil
> because it would control the sinful, less humane, black race.
> 
Sure, but we're discussing the root of the Xtian association of black
with an evil soul, not with biblically sanctioned skin colour-neutral
slavery.

> > Out of pure curiosity, when was the current racist use of 'black'
> > first coined and where did that happen?

> The quick version is that various "natural philosophers" in the late
> 1600s tried to describe and account for the different "races" that
> they encountered in the world.  One famous account is from François
> Bernier, entitled "New Division of the Earth by the Different Species
> or 'Races' of Man that Inhabit It."
> 
That just makes my point: that the term 'black list', first documented
to be used by Charles II in 1640 about assuredly used by English persons
with probably some Scandinavian ancestry (William of 1066 fame was of
mixed Norse-French ancestry) was referring to 'black sin' rather than
black skins before said 'natural philosophers', Linnaeus, etc. chose to
apply it to black-skinned people with a racial meaning.

Thanks for that confirmation.

Martin