Racism: How Did it All Begin?

There is an origin to everything.  Human activity, attitudes, and values all have their roots in history. We cannot deal with any of these in a historical vacuum.  Racism, the notion that one race is genetically superior to all others has a historical origin.

From a theological standpoint, I would submit that racism, just like all the other "isms' has its roots in the fall of humankind into sin.  The rupture in the relationship between God and humankind resulted in a rupture of human relations.  Humans began to discriminate against each other on the basis of class, ethnicity, gender, nationality, race, religion, sexual orientation, and xenophobia.

One may ask and debate as to whether racism itself is genetic or inbred.  Is it natural for people to be racist?  When one examines how racists deal with and treat people of other races, one can deny that racism is an inbred condition.

In this essay, I will deal with the origin of racism in the Americas.  As pointed out in a previous essay, racism is racism regardless of where it exists.  It takes on different forms and manifestations. At times it has been very subtly manifested and at other times, there have been outright expressions of this syndrome.

Richard Mather and John Cotton inherited from the English thinkers of their generation the old racist idea that African slavery was natural, normal, and holy.  These racist ideas were nearly two centuries old when Puritans used them in the 1630's to legalize and codify New England slavery-and Virginians had done the same in the 1620's.  Back in in 1415, Prince Henry and his brothers had convinced their father, King John of Portugal, to capture the principal Muslim trading depot in the Western Mediterranean: Ceuta on the northeastern tip of Morocco. These brothers were envious of Muslim riches, and they sought to eliminate the Islamic middleman so that they could find the southern source of gold and Black captives (Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning. New York: Nation Books, 2016, p. 22)

After the battle, Moorish prisoners left Prince Henry spellbound as they detailed trans-Saharan trade routes down into the disintegration Mali Empire.  Since Muslims still controlled these desert routes, Prince Henry decided to "seek the lands by way of the sea."  He sought out those African lands until his death in 1460, using his position as the Grand Master of Portugal's wealthy Military Order of Christ (Successor of the Knights Templar) to draw venture capital and loyal men for his African expeditions (Ibid.).

In 1452, Prince Henry's nephew, King Alfonso V, commissioned Gomes Eanes de Zurara to write a biography of the life and slave-trading work of his "beloved uncle."  Zurara was a learned and obedient commander in Prince Henry's Military Order of Christ.  In recording and celebrating Prince Henry's life, Zurara was also implicitly obscuring his Grand Master's monetary decision to exclusively trade in African slaves.  In 1453, Zurara finished the inaugural defense of African slave-trading, the first European book on Africa in the modern era.  The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea begins the recorded history of anti-Black racist ideas.  Zurara's inaugural racist ideas, in other words, were a product of, not a producer of, Prince Henry's racist policies concerning African slave-trading (P.E. Russell, Prince Henry "the Navigator:" A Life ( New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p, 6).

The Portuguese made history as the first Europeans to sail along the Atlantic beyond the Western Sahara's Cape Bojador in order to bring enslaved  Africans back to Europe as Zurara shared in his book.  The six caravels, carrying 240 captives, arrived in Lagos, Portugal on August 6, 1444. Prince Henry made the slave auction into a spectacle to show the Portuguese had joined the European league of serious slave-traders of African people.  For some time, the Genoese of Italy, the Catalans of northern Spain, and the Valencians of eastern Spain has been raiding the Canary Islands or purchasing African slaves from Moroccan traders.  Zurara distinguished the Portuguese by framing their African slave-trading ventures as missionary expeditions.  Prince Henry's competitors could not play that mind game as effectively as he did, in all likelihood because they still traded so many Eastern Europeans (Ibid, 249, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Charles Raymond Beazley, and Edgar Prestage,  Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, 2 vols. London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1896, 1, 6, 7, 29.)

But the market was changing.  Around the time the Portuguese opened their sea route to a new slave export area, the old slave export area started to close up.  In Ibn Khaldun's day, most of the captives sold in Western Europe were Eastern Europeans who had been seized by Turkish raiders from areas around the Black Sea.  So many of the seized captives were "Slavs" that the ethnic term became the root word for "slave" in most Western European languages.  By the mid-1400's, Slavic communities had built forts against slave raiders, causing the supply of Slavs in Western Europe's slave market to plunge at around the same time that the supply of Africans was increasing.  As a result, Western Europeans began to see the natural Slav(e) not as White, but Black ( William McKee Evans, Open Wound: The Long View of Race in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009, pps. 17-18).

The Captives in 1444 disembarked from the ship and marched to an open space outside of the city, according to Zurara's chronicle.  Prince Henry oversaw the slave auction, mounted on horseback, beaming in delight.  Some of the captives were "white enough, fair to look upon, and well proportioned," while others looked like "like mulattoes," Zurara reported. Still others were "as black as Ethiops, and so ugly" that they almost appeared as visitors from Hell.  The captives included people in the many shades of the Tuareg Moors as well as the dark-skinned people whom the Tuareg Moors may have enslaved.  Despite their different ethnicities and skin colors, Zurara viewed them as one people-one inferior people ( Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997, pps. 22-23).

Zurara made it a point to remind his readers that Prince Henry's "chief riches" in quickly seizing forty-six of the most valuable captives "lay in his own purpose for he reflected with great pleasure upon the salvation of those souls that before were lost."  In building up Prince Henry's evangelical justification for enslaving Africans, Zurara reduced these captives to barbarians who desperately needed not only religious but also civil salvation.  "They lived like beasts, without any custom of reasonable beings," he wrote.  What's more, "they have no knowledge of bread or wine, and they were without covering of clothes, or the lodgement of houses, and worse than all, they had no understanding of good, but only knew how to live in bestial sloth."  In Portugal, their lot was "quite the contrary of what it had been."  Zurara imagined slavery in Portugal as an improvement over their free state in Africa (Zurawa, et. al, Chronicle, 81-85, Prince Henry "the Navigator," 240-247, 253, 257-259).

Zurara's narrative covered from 1434 to 1447. During that period, Zurara estimated, 927 enslaved Africans were brought to Portugal, " the greater part of whom were turned into the truth path of salvation." Zurara failed to mention that Prince Henry received the royal fifth (quinto) or about  185 of these captives, for his immense fortune. But that was irrelevant to his mission, a mission he accomplished.  For convincing readers, successive popes, and the reading European world that Prince Henry's Portugal did not engage in the slave trade for money, Zurawa was handsomely rewarded as Portugal's chief royal chronicler, and he was given two more lucrative commanderships in the Military Order of Christ. Zurara's bosses quickly reaped returns from their slave trading.  In 1466, a Czech traveler noticed that the king of Portugal was making more selling captives to foreigners "than from all the taxes levied on the entire kingdom (Thomas, Slave Trade, 74 Zurara, et.al, Chronicle, xx-xl, Russell, Prince Henry "the Navigator," p. 246).

Zurara circulated the manuscript of the Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea to the Royal Court as well as to scholars, investors, and captain, who then read and circulated it throughout Portugal and Spain.  Zurara died in Lisbon in 1474, but his ideas about slavery endured as the slave trade expanded.  By the 1490's, Portuguese explorers had crept southward along the West African coast, rounding the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean. In their growing networks of ports, agents, ships, crews, and financiers, pioneering Portuguese slave-traders and explorers circulated the racist in Zurara book faster and farther than the text itself had reached.  The Portuguese became the primary source of knowledge on an unknown Africa and the African people for the original slave-traders and enslavers in Spain, Holland, France, and England.  By the time German printer Valentim Fernandes published an abridged version of Zurara's book in Lisbon in 1506, enslaved Africans-and racist ideas-had arrived in the Americas (Zurara et al., Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 187).

In 1481, the Portuguese began building a larger fort, Sao Jorge da Mina, simply as Elmina, or "the mine," as part of their plan to acquire Ghanaian gold.  In due time, this European building, the first known to be erected south of the Sahara, became West Africa's largest slave-trading post, the nucleus of Portugal's operations in West Africa.  A Genoese explorer barely three decades old may have witnessed the erection of Elmina Castle.  Christopher Columbus, newly married to the daughter of a Genoese protégé of Prince Henry, desired to make his own story-but not in Africa.  He looked instead to East Asia, the source of spices.  After Portuguese royalty refused to sponsor his daring westward expedition, Queen Isabel of Spain, a great-niece of Prince Henry, consented.  So in 1492, after sixty-nine days at sea, Columbus's three small ships touched the shores that Europeans did not know existed: first the glistening Bahamas, and the next night, Cuba (Thomas, Slave Trade, 71, 87).

Almost from Columbus's arrival, Spanish colonists began to degrade and enslave the indigenous American peoples, naming them "negros da terra (Blacks from the land)," transferring their racist constructions of African people onto Native Americans.  Over the years that followed, they used the force of the gun and the Bible in one of the most frightful and sudden massacres in human history.  Thousands of Native Americans died resisting enslavement.  More died from European diseases, from the conditions they suffered while forcibly tilling fields, and on death marches searching and mining for gold.  Millions of Native Americans were driven off their lands by Spanish settlers dashing into the colonies after riches.  Spanish merchant Pedro de las Casas settled in Hispaniola in 1502, the year the first enslaved Africans disembarked from a Portuguese slave ship.  He brought along his eighteen-year-old son Bartolome, who would play an outsized role in the direction slavery took in the so-called New World (Lawrence Clayton, "Bartolome de Las Casas, and the African Slave Trade," History Compass 7, no. 6 2009, p. 1527).

By 1510, Bartolome de Las Casas had accumulated land and captives as well as his ordination papers as the America's first priest.  He felt proud in welcoming the Dominican Friars to Hispaniola in 1511. Sickened by Taino slavery, the Friars stunned Las Casas and broke abolitionist ground, rejecting the Spanish line (taken from the Portuguese) that the Taino people benefitted, through Christianity, from slavery.  King Ferdinand promptly recalled the Dominican Friars, but their anti-slavery sermons never left Bartolome de Las Casas.  In 1515, he departed for Spain, where he would conduct a lifelong campaign to ease the sufferings of Native Americans, and possibly more importantly- solve the settlers extreme labor shortage.  In one of his first written pleas, in 1516, Las Casas suggested importing enslaved Africans to replace the rapidly declining Native American laborers, a plea he made again two years later.  Alonso de Zuazo, a University of Salamanca-trained lawyer, had made a similar recommendation back in 1510.  "General license should be given to bring negroes, a people strong for work, the opposite of the natives, so weak who can work only in undemanding tasks," Zuazo wrote.  In time, some indigenous peoples had gotten wind of this new racist idea and they readily agreed that that a policy of importing laborers would be better.  An indigenous group in Mexico complained that the "difficult and arduous work" involved in harnessing a sugar crop was "only for the blacks and not for the thin and weak Indians."  Las Casas and Company birthed twins-racist twins that some Native Americans and Africans took in: the myth of the physically strong, beastly African, and the myth of the physically weak Native American who easily died from the strain of hard labor (Thomas, Slave Trade, 50, 104, 123, Bethencourt, Racisms, 177-178, David M. Traboulay, Columbus and Las Casas: The Conquest and Christianization of America, 1492-1566. Lanham, MD: University Press of America , 1994, pps. 58-59).

Although Las Casas's ideas were at first discounted, his treatises soon became a useful tool for Spain's growing empire and its investment in American slavery.  Bishop Sebastian Ramirez de Fuenlean reported in 1531 that the "entire population.....of Espanola, San Juan, and even Cuba are demanding that they should have negroes to mine gold" and produce crops.  Las Casas led the charge for the historic passage in 1542 of the "New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians."  That memorable year, he also finished and sent to Prince Philip II his classic, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, and issued his third memorial recommending that enslaved Africans replace Native Americans (Kendi, p. 27).

At some point after that, Las Casas read Gomes Eanes de Zurawa's book.  The more he read, the less he could square the African slave trade with the teachings of Jesus Christ.  In History of the Indies (1561), released five years before his death, Las Casas regretted "the advice he gave the king" to import enslaved Africans.  He saw in Zurara's writing, evidence revealing the slave trade to "be the horror that it is."  Las Casas lamented Zurara's attempt "to blur (the slave trade) with the mercy and goodness of God."  Las Casas tried to close the door on African slavery, after opening it for so many Spanish slaveholders. He failed.  A powerful reformer labeled a radical extremist in his last days-like every antiracist who came after him-Las Casas was condemned in Spain after his death, and his works were practically banned there.  Catholic Spain's Protestant rivals published and republished his devastating Account of the Destruction of the Indies-in Dutch (1578), French (1578), English (1583), and German (1599)-in their quest to label the Spanish Empire corrupt and morally repugnant, all in their quest to replace Spain as Europe's superpower (Lawrence A. Clayton, Bartolome de Las Casas: A Biography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pps. 349-353, 420-428. Bethencourt, Racisms, p. 233.  Peter N. Stearns, Sexuality in World History. New York, Routledge, p. 108).

Despite Spain's rise, Portugal remained the undisputed power of the African slave trade. And Gomes Eanes de Zurara's racist ideas remained Europe's undisputed defenders of slave trading until another man, an African, rose up to the legacy.  Around 1510, Al-Hasan Ibn-Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, a well-educated Moroccan, accompanied his uncle on a diplomatic mission down into the Songhay Empire.  Eight years later, he was enslaved on another diplomatic voyage along the Mediterranean Sea.  His captors presented the learned twenty-four-year-old to the scholarly Pope Leo X in Italy.  Before dying in 1521, the Pope freed the youngster, converted him to Christianity, renamed him Johannes Leo, and possibly commissioned him to write a survey of Africa.  He became known as Leo the African, or Leo Africanus.  He satisfied Italian curiosity in 1526 with the first scholarly survey of Africa in Europe, Description of Africa (Kendi, p. 28).

Leo Africanus described the etymology of Africa and then surveyed African geography, languages, cultures, religions, and diseases. His summation: "There is no Nation under Heaven more prone to Venery (sexual indulgence)." The Africans "leade a beastly kind of life, being utterly destitute of the use of reason, of dexterities of wit, and of all arts,"  Africanus wrote.  "They behave themselves as if they had continually lived in a Forrest among wild beasts (Ibid.)"

Leo the African did not ignore the elephant in the room.  How do "I my selfe write so homely of Africa ," he asked, when "I stand indebted to Africa for both my birth and education?"  He considered himself to be a "historiographer" charged with telling "the plaine truth in all places."  Africanus did not mind if Africans were denigrated.  He believed he was describing Africans accurately (Leo Africanus, John Pory, and Robert Brown, "The History and Description of Africa, 3 vols.  London: Hakluyt Society, 1896, pps. 130, 187-190).

Leo Africanus established himself through Description of Africa as the world's first known African racist, the first illustrious African producer of racist ideas (as Zurara was the first illustrious European producer of racist ideas).  Anyone can consume or produce racist ideas of African inferiority-any European, any Asian, any Native American, any Latina/o, and any African.  Leo's African ancestry hardly shielded him from believing in African inferiority and European superiority, or from trying to convince others of this plain racist "truth (Kendi, p. 29)."

Leo Africanus may have never visited the fifteen African lands he claims to have seen.  He could have paraphrased the notes of Portuguese travelers.  But veracity did not matter.  Once the manuscript was finished in 1526, once it was published in Italian in 1550, and once it was translated into French and Latin in 1556, readers across Western Europe were consuming it and tying African people to hypersexuality, to animals, and to lack of reason.  It is not known what happened to Leo the African, the author of the most widely read, and most influential book on Africa-next to Zurara's-during the 1500. He made countless Europeans feel that they knew him, or rather, knew Africa (Ibid).

Around the time Leo the African's text was making its way through Europe, and around the time Richard Mather's parents were born, the British began their quest to break the monopoly on African slave-trading, eager to reap the benefits and grow their empire.  In 1554, an expedition, captained by John Lok, ancestor of philosopher John Locke, arrived in England after traveling to "Guinea."  Lok and his compatriots, Robert Gainish and William Towerson docked with 450 pounds of gold, 250 ivory tusks, and five enslaved African men.  These three Englishmen established themselves as the new authorities on Africa and African people among curious British minds.  Their opinions seemed to be shaped as much by the Portuguese and French as by their observations.  Sounding like Leo Africanus or Zurara, Gainish labeled a "people of beastly living, without a God, law, religions, or common wealth."  The five "beats" that he and his shipmates brought back to England all learned English and were sent back to Africa to serve as translators for English readers (Joseph R. Washington, Anti-Blackness in English Religion, 1500-1800. New York: E. Mellen Press, 1984, pps. 105-111, Thomas, Slave Trade, pps. 153-159).

As English contact with Africans matured, so did the desire to explain the radical color differences. Writers like Gainish applied climate theory to the dark skins of Africa and light skins of Europe. The popular theory made sense when looking at Europe, the Mediterranean, and Africa.  But what about the rest of the world?  During the final decades of the sixteenth century, a new genre of British literature adopted a different theory. Writers brought amazing stories of the world into Anglican homes, into the Puritan homes of Richard Mather, and John Cotton, and into the homes of other future leaders of colonial America.  And these worldly stories were as racist as they were amazing (Kendi,  p. 30).

En fin, we find that racism, having, as I stated at the beginning of this essay, has  its roots in the fall into sin of humankind, has been permeated throughout history in the institutions and literature of Western European society.  This is not to say that racism is naturally genetic and inherent to European peoples or their descendants, but indeed, because of the power that Anglo and European people have exerted throughout the centuries, it is much easier to equate racism with being a Caucasian phenomenon.

Economic, military, and political hegemony go hand in hand with racism.  Those who have the power to rule, also have the power to relegate others to conditions and positions of  social inferiority.  Racism, then, becomes institutional, structural, and systemic.

Liberation Theology deals addresses and deals with the issue of systemic racism by unmasking it, identifying it, and denouncing it.  Liberation Theology calls the community of faith to repent for being complicit in participating and justifying institutional racism, and calls for the community of faith to reverse its path by engaging with all those movements, faith-based or not, to fight the tripartite beast of institutional, structural, and systemic racism.  God calls.  We respond.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Juan A. Carmona
Past Professor of Theology
Tainan Theological College/Seminary