How Race Was Made (Seeing White, Part 2)

And maybe, you know, of course your book starts thousands of years ago, but here's a thought I had about the starting point, which is when I was in high school in Minnesota in the late 1970s, I can still remember very vividly in my social studies textbook, the Three Races of Man. And I can see the images of the Mongoloid, the Caucasoid, and the Negroid. It was presented as a scientific biological fact, sort of like, you know, there's certain kinds of rocks and here's the map of the world and then these are the Three Races. So, is it a scientific biological fact? The Three Races in the order usually presented, Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid, Caucasoid at the top, is not a biological fact and only became science in the sense of anthropologists said that this is true in the 1940s. That's Nell Irvin Painter, historian, Princeton Professor Emerita, an author of the History of White People. I'm John Bewin, it's Seen on Radio. Welcome to part two of our series, Seam White, looking at the past and present of whiteness in the world and especially the United States. Where this idea of being white came from and what it's for. In this episode we're going back, well not really to the beginning, science now tells us that in the beginning of the human story, people evolved in Africa from one common ancestor a couple hundred thousand years ago. We're all kin and all African if you just go back far enough. Over time some people walked out of Africa and spread across the world. The branches of the family that spent thousands of years in colder places without a lot of sun. They lost much of their melanin and turned a bunch of different shades depending on the conditions where they were. That's how we became a species ranging from the darkest brown to the lightest pink beige and everything in between. Shades of brown with an array of yellowish and reddish tinges. All of that explains why people look different. It does not explain the wildly inconsistent and ever changing groupings that people have concocted over the last few centuries. It doesn't explain my high school textbook. So we believe we need to know how we got this thing called race. If we're gonna understand racism. Susanne Placic is with the racial equity institute. The team is based in Greensboro, North Carolina but travels the country doing anti-racism workshops. I recorded Susanne and her colleagues a few months ago in Charlotte. REI's courses are not diversity training. Their approach is not kumbaya, let's get along, let's tolerate one another. Instead they drop a whole lot of knowledge, especially history but also sociology, biology. We know for example since the human genome project that we are what percentage genetically the same as human beings? 99. What? 99.99. Genetically the same. There is more genetic variation in a flock of pinguins than there is in the human race. There is more genetic variation within groups that have come to be called races. Then there is a cross groups that have come to be called races statistically likely or that I am closer to you genetically. Susanne who is white points at a black man. Then I am to you. And then a white woman. Anthropologists finally say and it is way past due that races anthropological nonsense. Is that the same thing as saying it's not real? No. No, because it's real. It is powerfully real, it's politically and socially real. So we need to know how did we get it and what we say is we constructed it. To tell the story of the construction of race and therefore of whiteness. Let's go back to the beginnings of Western civilization. Why? Well because of course it's Westerners who would come to call themselves white but also because Westerners would become the inventors eventually of race as we know it. We go back to Greece because that's where we think of this as our cultural beginnings. And in ancient Greece says no painter. There was no notion of race. People could look at other people and see some people were lighter and some people were darker. But what did that mean? What did that mean? Greeks notably Herodotus 5th century BC. Herodotus traveled. We don't know that he actually traveled to all the places that he talked about but he did talk about what was then the known world, his known world. And he did not use the word race but he talked about how people live, where people live. The climate is the air, humid or dry. Is the landscape hilly or flat? Is there a lot of water around? How do the people live? Do they live on horseback? Do they walk around? And how do they look? They could see differences in skin color. So for instance Ethiopian comes from burnt skin. Actually Herodotus thought that the Ethiopians were the handsomeest people in the world kind of as an aside. So if race didn't exist for the Greeks, does that mean they saw all humans as equal? No. For culture the ancient Greeks naturally thought that their culture was the best and that they were the civilized people and other people were barbarians. The Ethiopians to the south who happened to be darker? Good looking or not, they were barbarians. But so were the pasty people to the east. The Persians for instance were light skinned and they were too light skinned for upper class Greeks who played their games in the nude and got suntanned and they would laugh at Persians for spending too much time indoors and the indication of that was that the Persians were really light skinned. They didn't go outside and get suntanned. They were unhealthy. The Greeks saw lesser humans in every direction to the northwest, the Celts. That word 'Kelt' comes from the Greek name for the Celts, Keltoy, which meant roughly the strange barbarian people to the west. And to the northeast of Greece, the Scythians, a loosely defined term that seems to have applied to people we would now call Slavic, but also Asian. The Greeks decided all those non-Greaks were inferior, not because of the color of their skin or anything hereditary, but because of where and how they lived. Oh and yes, in the ancient world there was a whole lot of Slaven going on. Slavery is so much bigger. Slave trades are so much bigger than our idea of race. The Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, the West African kingdoms, they all practiced forms of slavery. The Vikings, all that pillaging they were known for, one of the main things the Vikings pillaged, was people. And people of every color got enslaved. Folks in Eastern Europe were hauled off into bondage so often, and for so many centuries, that the very word 'slave' derived from their name. Yes, love! But if all that slavery in the ancient world was not about race, because race hadn't been invented yet, well who did invent it and when? Going into this, I did not expect an answer to that question in the form of one person's name and the year of the invention. But here's a scholar who says, "Yeah, I'll tell you who did it." So yeah, my name is Ibram Kendi and I'm an assistant professor of history at the University of Florida. Ibram Kendi's book, stamped from the beginning, the definitive history of racist ideas in America, won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2016. Before we get to the guy, Kendi blames for inventing race and racism, a little more context that he offers about the ancient world. Yes, he says, people have always had the tendency to see themselves as the very best sort of people, Aristotle built a human hierarchy based on climate theory, which claimed that the sort of temperate region of the Mediterranean has produced the most superior peoples while the extreme cold or extreme hot northern or southern climates sort of lead to these inferior peoples. But Kendi points out that not everybody thought that way even back then. Just as you had these notions of human hierarchy in the pre-modern world in the ancient world, so too did you have individuals like Aristotle's chief foe and Athens. He's talking about a philosopher named Alkadamus who challenged those notions. Aristotle said nature intended for some people to be enslaved by others. Alkadamus wrote that God has left all men free. Nature has made no man a slave. And likewise, Kendi says, just like you had some Christians are using Christianity to to justify certain peoples as inferior, so too did you have St. Augustine and other early Christian fathers who who challenged those notions and expressed human equality. Throughout history, he says there have always been thinkers who understood that humans are one. And there have always been people with the capacity to admire cultures and societies different from their own. Kendi points to a man named Ibn Batuta, the Moroccan born in 1304. Yeah, Ibn Batuta who was basically is considered to be the 14th century's greatest world traveler. And so he traveled all the way over to Asia, up and through Eastern Europe, into Middle East. He also traveled into sub-Sahara Africa. And he of course wrote about his travels and described sub-Sahara Africa, specifically the Mali empire, which was, so you had these three major sort of empires in pre-colonial West Africa, Ghana, Mali and Songhai. Some argue Mali was the most illustrious in the richest. And so he visited Mali and spoke quite glowingly about Mali and how, for instance, that, you know, he traveled many places, but in Mali, you know, he felt safer than anywhere else. He also spoke about sort of the civilization of the people and other things of that sort. And when he went back to Morocco and wrote that, some of the armchair intellectuals thought he must be lying. Batuta's claims about the glories of Mali were shouted down as lies for a very practical reason. His Islamic Moroccan society was busy enslaving people from sub-Saharan Africa, as well as Slavs from Eastern Europe. And so to classify these people as not inferior would have been, of course, difficult for slave traders just as if people didn't classify the Slavs as inferior would have been bad for business as well. About a century after Ibn Batuta wrote admiringly about West African kingdoms, a Portuguese man wrote a book. And here we get to Ibn Kendi's culprit. His name was Gomez de Zorara. As Kendi recounts, the King of Portugal had hired Zorara to write a biography of the King's uncle in Fonte Enrique, better known as Prince Henry the Navigator. Who, of course, was the first major slave trader to exclusively enslave and trade in African people from, of course, Portugal. In the mid 1400s, writing in 1453, Zorara chronicles and glorifies Prince Henry's historic voyage a decade before. It was the first time Europeans sailed to sub-Saharan Africa to seize captives directly rather than buying sub-Saharan slaves from North African middlemen. In describing a resulting slave auction back in Portugal in 1444, Zorara lumped together the very different looking captives, some lighter-skinned, tuareg people, others much darker. He claimed that Prince Henry's main motive was to bring them to Christianity. So Zorara portrayed slavery as an improvement over freedom in Africa where he wrote, "They lived like beasts. They had no understanding of good, but only knew how to live in beastial sloth." And so I basically make the case that he was the first articulator of racist ideas and in order for him to articulate racist ideas, he had to basically combine all of the different ethnic groups that Prince Henry was enslaving into one people and then describing that people as inferior. And so presumably then, he, though he did not necessarily speak as much about whiteness, he certainly created blackness and blackness, of course, cannot really operate without whiteness. And to Kendi, this is crucial. Zorara was not just some independent chronicleer calling them as he saw them. As I said before, he was hired to write the book by the Portuguese king Prince Henry's nephew. Zorara was also a member of the military order of Christ, which was like this para sort of military/Christian organization similar to like the Knights of Templar, and who was the leader of the military order of Christ, Prince Henry. And when Prince Henry said something, you were a member, you did it, including make him look good for slave trading. So it's fair to say literally that slave traders commissioned the invention of this sort of codified racist idea of black people and implicitly then on the other hand of white people. Yes. Zorara's writings were widely circulated among the elite in Portugal. In the coming years, the Portuguese and their ideas about Africans led the way as the African slave trade expanded among countries like Spain, Holland, France, and England. And then by the 1500s, you had other ideologues expressing similar ideas about African people. So the concept of the beast becomes sort of the way in which, for instance, the first British slave traders described African people. So when the British colonists came to the United States, what would become the United States, they were steeped in these ideas. Is that fair to say? Yes. And so I make the case and I sort of show the pervasiveness of racist ideas in England before in the early 1600s to sort of show the environment that these colonists were brought up in and the racist ideas that were circulating. And how not only did they bring over bags, they brought over these racist ideas in their minds by the late 1600s and into the 1700s with the scientific revolution and the age of enlightenment. Scientists got busy sorting the natural world into categories like never before. And they did the same with people. This is Nell Painter again, author of The History of White People. During the Enlightenment, for Carolus Lenea's system, I know Turai, it's 1758 and then Yacht Friedrich Blumenbach in Göttingen, Germany, first publishing in the 1770s by the 1780s and the 1790s using the word Caucasian for white people. Lenea's named for human races, Blumenbach 5. That was just the beginning of an unending argument about how to do the impossible, how to separate humanity neatly into distinct groups. Much later an American anthropologist would say, "No, it's three races, the three in my high school textbook." And I remember, I think I remember even as a 16-year-old, 17-year-old looking at that and thinking and having questions. Let's see, what about all the people who don't fit neatly into these three groups? Yes, and this has always been a problem for racial science. Racial science that we'll be hearing more about in a future episode. But first, hey, Chandra, it's me again. Hey, hey, what's going on? John, how you doing, man? As we established in the introductory episode for the Seeing White series, I'm going to be talking with this friend of mine sometimes to help unpack some of the ideas that come up in the episode. Chandra, Kumanika, Communications Professor at Clemson, a scholar, journalist, organizer, artist, and a gentleman. Mino binogento, man, it's all like failure, you know what I mean? So I have to tell you, Chandra, I learned so much from these particular, these two scholars, professors, painter, and candy in their books. Oh, man. Oh, it's just, you know, it's some deep scholarship. Dude, it's my blood. I mean, this is what happens when you actually call people who like know what they're talking about, like they're an expert in that field, you know what I mean? Because that doesn't always happen. I mean, this is what happens, right? Like people think just, you know, like a person is black, you know, I've seen things on race, they like pull Kanye, they pull, you know, they might pull Shaquille O'Neal. It's like, wait, why are you interviewing these people to talk about race? That's not that thing. So, you know, whatever I know, I definitely, I can't do with, uh, with candy and painter. So I'm glad you talked to them. I couldn't get Charles Barclay's phone number. Oh, well, yeah, we missed out on that anyway. So how about this, you know, I think we, most of the time we don't, most of us have heard the news about the genome project, but I don't think it's really sunk in in the culture at all. Has it that we are? For example, that you and I are, uh, I think geneticists think that every human on the planet is no more than 50th cousins with every other human on the planet. Oh, we haven't gotten much in the habit of thinking that way, have we? That, that like we're cousins, you and I? Yes, exactly. Yeah. You know, and in the piece we heard Susanne Plyssik, uh, from the racial equity institute say that race is not scientifically real and yet it's very real politically and socially. It's, it's kind of a tricky thing to, to make sense of, isn't it? Right. Yeah. I mean, and, you know, I got to say, when I, when I really am putting on like when I'm being sympathetic, I can kind of understand why it's confusing to people because for people who haven't thought about this on one level, that's what you're trying to get them to understand, right? Like the science, you know, the genes, the genetic diversity and you're like, listen, you know, scientifically race is like not real. It's not, it's not a thing. But then like, let's just say I'm talking to, you know, a white person who's the whole lives matter crowd, you know, like I'm talking to like a white person who's part, and he's just like exactly. So why don't we just stop talking about race? And it's like, well, no, no, it's actually real. And that's confusing, you know, I mean, that's actually confusing. Right to person who says, so let's see, we can stop being concerned about it. We can stop talking about it. We can stop even keeping track of data on how, on the different experiences of black people. You all need to just stop making a fuss about race if you think, if you're going to insist that it isn't real. And yeah, that doesn't work too well. Does it? Yeah. I mean, I think that's, that's totally wrong, you know, but it is confusing. It's like race isn't real biologically, but it is very real as a way that society has been structured. And there's real, you know, the effects of race as a social construct are real. The reason we can't stop talking about it is because we can predict wealth distribution, police killing, all kinds of other, you know, sort of life expectancy factors, health issues based on race, you know, access to schools because society has been organized around a concept that is not biologically real. And then there's another thing about race to me that's, there's also confusing, which is that we want people to understand race as like the systemic thing, like the structural thing that is like institutions and is in patterns of, you know, the way rights and resources are distributed. And it's like a structural thing. It's not about just attitudes like just about, you know, like your distant cousin who's a big it, right? But we also do use the term racist for that too, right? So, so I think that's confusing too, because those seem like different things to me. Right. And that connects, and we talked about that last time and it connects in a really significant way with the point that I think Professor Kendi is trying to make in his, with his history of racist ideas in the US, which is that he argues that we basically have the cause and effect relationship backwards. Right. That we're sort of in the habit of thinking that the problem with race and racism starts with attitudes that people look at other people and they look different or come from a different place. And so there's this tendency to look down on that person or to have prejudice toward them and therefore to then think, well, I guess it's okay to exploit or mistreat this person. And that's the history of racism. That's how this all has happened. And his argument is that it goes exactly in the other direction. Right. I mean, and if you think about it, I don't know about you, but that's kind of like the history I sort of grew up on, right? It was almost like, you know, why people didn't really know they didn't understand that other people were human. And that's why they mistreated people. But you can't really blame them because once they learned, then, you know, they started treating people better. So, you know, you sort of, you know, can't be mad. They just, it was, it was, you know, it was ignorance. And it is. It's a weird thing like the ignorance is what caused the exploitation. And I think that's totally wrong. Right. I think because if you think about it, you know, when Columbus on his like first and second voyage over to the so-called New World, you know, the mission was exploitation before they even met up with the arrow wax and a Thai, you know, Indians, you know, like the whole issue was we're going to set up colonies and try to take land and try to get resources. Right. And it wasn't like, you know, they just decided to do that once they encountered these people and didn't understand them. And slavery too. I mean, people want to Africa to steal them some people. They didn't, they didn't go, you know, as tourists and then look around and say, oh, look, look, there's these people who, right, they, right. We think are inferior. And therefore, I guess will. And what are we going to do with it? Yeah, they didn't, they didn't say like, oh, man, here's these people, you know, they're like subhuman and like three fifths of a human being. So what can we do? Oh, let's create slavery. No, I mean, but that's kind of like what I grew up on and what people think. They just didn't know. And it's like, no, actually, no, what they knew was that there was an economy they had like rice and cotton and other things that sugar had to be, you know, produced to make this economy go. And they wanted cheap labor and they enslaved people. And then, and then they later sort of deployed the science and all these other cultural forms to match and support the idea that they could exploit these people because they were inferior. So it's, it really, to me, even though, you know, once you really look at that, the idea that exploitation comes versus is just, you know, it's just the more rational explanation. Right. And even some of this history that we heard about, you know, all kinds of people enslaved, all kinds of people, including in, in many cases, people enslaved people who look like them. That's right. So, you know, it was only more in the kind of in the last few hundred years that at the same time that you had the enlightenment and people to some degree, having higher standards for how human beings treated each other. That then, then it, it seems that it became more necessary to have a justification to dehumanize folks before you to justify enslaving them. That's right. And, you know, but, but it, but it's, yeah, there's the slavery that came first, not the other way around. And I think it's easier for people to think about it like it was, it's all just a matter of attitudes and not understanding. And like, maybe people just didn't sit down and eat enough dinners together or something like that because when you think of it that way, you can make it about individuals who didn't understand where when you understand the way the exploitation was sort of baked into the project of Western imperialism and, you know, the development of the United States. Then you have to go and question much more fundamental structures and much more fundamental ideas about, about our culture and all these other things. So, I think it's, it's harder to have to look at that. Ginger Eye Kumanika. Thanks to Nell Irvin Painter and Ibrahim Candy and the folks from the Racial Equity Institute will be hearing more from all of them in the next episode. In which we come to these shores. A look at how race thinking and whiteness blossomed. Well, that's one way of putting it in colonial America and the USA. Is this a little bit crazy? It gets crazier and we need to understand that because folks on crazy, we built a nation. We did. If you like the idea of more people hearing this series and the show in general, please think about taking just a couple of minutes to give us a rating and review on iTunes or your podcast app of choice. If we get enough of those, the apps show scene on radio to more people and they find out we exist. Music this time out by Blue Dot Sessions, Lena Polera, Kevin MacLeod, and Lucas Bewin. Scene on radio is on Twitter and Facebook. Follow us, like us, tell us what you think. The show comes to you from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. [Music] From PRX.