The Brooklyn Rail

Lisa Farrington’s book, The World Before Racism: An Art Story, compels us to realize that racism is broader, deeper, and stronger than we realize, or want to realize, and also more arbitrary. For one thing, it reminds us that racism is more profoundly rooted in economic and social issues than in genetics, since “races” are largely cultural inventions constructed in the wake of the economic and social changes that followed widespread Western European exploration and colonization beginning in the fifteenth century.

American racism is deeply rooted in economic interests, starting with the free labor provided by chattel slaves, and continuing with policies of free and cheap labor provided by large prison systems and discriminatory compensation and taxation policies (the largely Black population of domestic and farm workers, for example, was long excluded from benefits such as minimum wage, unemployment benefits, and Social Security coverage). Also, as is often the case, economic interests become entangled with religious beliefs, which can be used to enforce social practices. The religious connections with racism are especially important since the impulse to self-righteousness often accompanies the urge to greed, and it has historically been convenient for racists to evoke a particular kind of hierarchical social system that is supposed to be divinely inspired, in which the basic humanity of Black people can be diminished—even annihilated—in order to justify the construction of a profoundly exploitative economic system.

At the time that the slave trade began to flourish, longstanding arguments had already existed in defense of a divinely sanctioned hierarchy of subordination—of Providence creating (or sanctioning) social inequality. As Jacob Viner has remarked in The Role of Providence in the Social Order (Princeton, 1977), in the eighteenth century it was sometimes “noted that God had dealt out his revelations partially, bestowing them on some but not on other peoples, and on some but not on other individuals.” This supposedly God-willed inequality allowed for religiously sanctioned belief in the inferiority of certain people, based on some combination of their race, social standing, or religion. And after the European powers began to explore and then exploit both sub-Saharan Africa and the Western Hemisphere, large supplies of cheap labor became increasingly necessary to produce New World crops such as sugarcane, cotton, and tobacco, which were hugely lucrative and also greatly labor intensive. As those enterprises grew, in order to justify the merciless, often inhuman, treatment of the enslaved people engaged in doing the work, the self-righteous people who owned those slaves shaped the social order by creating a number of stereotypes that diminished—even annihilated—the very humanity of the workers they enslaved. As Lisa Farrington makes clear in her book, denying the personhood of a human being lies at the very core of racism. With regard to Africans, this was made palatable even to pious white people by emphasizing the role of inferiority that Providence had assigned to those African “savages,” which justified denying them any civil rights and even denied them the right to learn to read and write—uniquely human skills that were prohibited by law in most of the Slave States.

Reading this book made me wonder why such significant events in American history as the racially motivated massacres of financially successful Blacks (for example, the Tulsa “Black Wall Street” massacre of 1921) are not widely known. It also made me think of a number of incidents in my own life that took on new resonance. For example, I remembered the time in 1969 when I was in the county courthouse at the central Florida town of Tavares, and was shocked to discover that the water fountains were still marked “White” and “Colored.” Since this was several years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the signs on the fountains had clearly been intentionally left unchanged, as explicit reminders of how Black folks were to be regarded as separate and unequal, even in the county courthouse, and despite what the law might actually be. The purpose behind such a reminder is similar to the way in which, after public hangings in England were abolished, the gibbets remained in place to remind people of how criminals had once been hanged and displayed in public.

Lisa Farrington’s discussion of the origins and persistence of such attitudes is eye-opening. It is surprising to learn that even distinguished philosophers, such as Hegel and David Hume, subscribed to intensely racist views (Hume wrote that “there never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than White”); that even such well-known scientists as Carl Linnaeus, Georges Cuvier, Georges-Louis Leclerc De Buffon, and Herbert Spencer (who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”) allowed their racial prejudices to blind them to scientific facts.

And along the way, there are some unexpected revelations. For example, when I fill out official forms, I often wonder why I am supposed to describe myself as “Caucasian.” Among the many treasures that Farrington’s book has to offer is the surprisingly absurd answer to that question: The term was coined in 1795 by the German scholar Johann Blumenbach, who believed that Noah’s Ark had landed in the Caucasus mountains, carrying—of course—the kind of people who, “according to our opinion of symmetry, we consider most handsome and becoming.”