1630: Western Notions of the "Black Race"
The Idea of Racial Superiority
The shift in labor source represented more than an opportunistic seizing of human “property” that came from the Atlantic Slave trade. The almost casual shift from poor white laborers to enslaved Black laborers came from deeply entrenched Western racist ideas that perceived Black skin as inferior to white (Kendi, 2017, p. 17).
In early America, distrust of Black skin was reinforced by Puritan preachers who had “learned rationales for human hierarchy [from Aristotle] and … began to believe that some groups were superior to other groups… Puritans believed they were superior to Native Americans, the African people, and even Anglicans—that is all non-Puritans” (Kendi, 2017, p. 17).
They also argued that such a hierarchy was “biblical” by relying on a story in the first book of the Bible of Noah cursing his son Ham. The reasoning shared by influential preachers went something like this: “[T]he Negroes were the children of Ham, the son of Noah, and … they were singled out to be black as the result of Noah’s curse, which produced Ham’s colour and the slavery God inflicted upon his descendants” (Kendi, 2017, p. 21).
The “curse” theory, as it was known, validated the existence of a God-ordained hierarchy between the races – the white race represented the chosen leaders of mankind and the Black race represented those cursed and inferior.
Watch a short video on the Origins of Race