Overview
This lecture discusses the historical development of racial classification, the history and scale of global slave trades, and the evolution of scholarship on race, with insights on the intersection of business, politics, and identity in shaping narratives about race and slavery.
Enlightenment, Science, and Race Classification
- The 18th-century Enlightenment shifted the source of truth from religion (Bible) to science.
- Taxonomy (classification) was applied to humans, led by figures like Linnaeus and Blumenbach.
- Blumenbach argued for five human races, a model that was influential for a long period.
- Other theorists, such as Miners, proposed classifications based on subjective traits like beauty and ugliness.
- Racial classification systems varied by context, criteria, and the classifiers’ biases.
The Concept of Race and Racism
- Race is a conceptual category, while racism refers to policies and practices of discrimination.
- Definitions and boundaries of races and ethnicities are fluid and change over time, depending on context and policy (e.g., US census).
- American racial classification systems (white, black, Asian, Hispanic) are recent and context-dependent.
- Class and race are intertwined differently in the US and UK.
Origins and Evolution of Racism & Slave Trades
- Modern racism’s legal framework emerged from moments like Bacon’s Rebellion but developed differently across regions.
- The growth of the Atlantic slave trade in the 18th century shifted labor demographics in the Americas from Europeans to Africans.
- The Atlantic slave trade became a massive, rationalized business industry involving supply chains, warehouses, and finance.
- Slavery existed globally and took many forms; scale and organization differentiated the Atlantic trade from others like the Black Sea slave trade.
- The Black Sea and Mediterranean slave trades predate Atlantic slavery by millennia and persisted until the early 20th century.
Narratives, Identity, and Scholarship
- There’s often resistance to acknowledging the universality and scale of non-African slavery.
- Narratives about slavery and race have been shaped by those in power and can obscure or minimize the experiences of certain groups.
- Academic fields like African and African-American studies emerged from different political and intellectual histories.
- Black scholars often face pigeonholing and expectations to focus exclusively on black subjects.
- The concept of “whiteness” and its boundaries have shifted over time and have been used flexibly to support social hierarchies.
- Scholarship and narratives are shaped by market forces, audience, and who controls publication.
Key Terms & Definitions
- Taxonomy — the science of classification, applied here to human groups.
- Race — a social and historical concept used to classify humans, not a biological absolute.
- Racism — systemic discrimination or policies based on racial categorization.
- Atlantic Slave Trade — large-scale forced migration and enslavement of Africans to the Americas from the 16th–19th centuries.
- Black Sea Slave Trade — ancient and long-lasting slave trade of Slavic and other peoples to the Mediterranean.
- Chattel Slavery — a form of slavery where people are treated as property to be bought, sold, and inherited.
Action Items / Next Steps
- Read Dr. Painter’s “The History of White People” for further insight into race construction.
- Explore changing census and classification categories to understand how race and ethnicity are defined.
- Review narratives and case studies of different slave trades for comparative perspective.
- Investigate the influence of scholarship origins and market on historical narratives.