Quote:
Originally Posted by Adder
Race wasn't really a thing until it was needed to justify chattel slavery of Africans. Some have traced the concept to 15th century Portugal.
|
I think it's more complicated than that.
If Atticus were here, I think he'd tell us race = ethnicity in ancient European times. Germans and Celts were races separate from Romans and Greeks. Skin color wasn't considered any more distinctive than hair color or eye color.
Medieval Islamic thinkers and travelers spent a lot of time wondering if skin color was environmental, and whether a person relocating to sub-Saharan Africa or southern India might get darker over time while someone braving the frosts of the north might get paler. Christians liked to talk about races in biblical terms - descendants of Ham, tribes of Israel. Jews were almost always described as racially as well as religiously distinct in the Christian world. In almost every culture, there was some kind of a civilized/uncivilized distinction that was more important than any racial one and usually didn't correspond to skin color.
My understanding is the change that happens in post-Columbian times may have as much to do with Native Americans brought over to Europe as both slaves and curiosities and with sailors trying to figure out and describe the worlds they were "discovering" populated by many "races" of people as with the African slave trade. Certainly the process by which black slaves traded by first the Portuguese and then the English replaced American Indian, Slavic, Berber and other slaves had a lot to do with the development of race based on color as a concept and particularly with the idea that there was a "black" race that excluded lighter skinned brown folks and was limited to people from sub-Sahara Africa. But I think the idea race is closely tied to color and is inherited and not environmental only really gets established after Linnaeus, though, who was dividing humanity like he was dividing other species and decided that skin color was the most important difference.
