Rushton: Race and Racism in History

A useful corrective to the oft-heard ‘racism originated during the enlightenment to justify oppression by Europeans of other races’ canard. From J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, 1997), chapter five, ‘Race and Racism in History’:

For millennia, racism was not a word, it was a way of life. Ethnic nepotism and prohibitions against hybridization are a matter of historical record. Downgrading the importance of race not only conflicts with people’s evolved tendency to classify and build histories according to putative descent, but ignores the work of biologists studying other species. In his 1758 work, Linnaeus classified four subspecies of Homo sapiens: europaeus, afer, asiatic, and americanus. Most subsequent classifications recognize at least the three major subdivisions considered in this book: Negroid, Caucasoid, and Mongoloid.

Racism

The most fundamental relationship recognized by tribal man is that of blood, or descent; in many cases anyone not made a relative becomes an enemy. Primitive society often seems to be organized on two major principles: that the only effective bond is a bond of blood, and that the purpose of society is to unite for wars of offense and defense. Sometimes tribes take the name ‘men,’ meaning we alone are men, whereas outsiders are something else, often not defined at all. […]

Identification of racial variation in man based on differences in morphology and pigmentation is as old as recorded history. As referenced by Loehlin et al. (1975), in 1200 RC. the Egyptians of the Nineteenth Dynasty painted polychromatic human figures on the walls of their royal tombs depicting peoples of different skin color and hair form: red (Egyptians), yellow (Asiatic and Semitic), black (sub-Saharan African), and white (western and northern European, also shown with blue eyes and blond beards).

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In the Bible, from a single ancestor, the three sons of Noah are mythically divided into the descendents of Shem (Semites), Ham (non-Semitic Mediterraneans, sometimes said to include Negroids), and Japheth (northern peoples, sometimes said to mean Indo-Europeans, or Aryans). The Jews were descended from Shem and were warned by Jehovah to preserve themselves as ‘a special people unto himself, above all the people that are upon the face of the earth’ (Deut. 7: 6). The patriarch Noah condemned Canaan, one of Ham’s sons and his descendents to be ‘a servant of servants ... unto his brethren’ (Gen. 9: 25-27). This verse was used by the Israelites to sanction their subjugation of the Canaanites when they conquered the Promised Land and later by both Christians and Muslims to justify their slavery of blacks.

In the Bible, from a single ancestor, the three sons of Noah are mythically divided into the descendents of Shem (Semites), Ham (non-Semitic Mediterraneans, sometimes said to include Negroids), and Japheth (northern peoples, sometimes said to mean Indo-Europeans, or Aryans). The Jews were descended from Shem and were warned by Jehovah to preserve themselves as ‘a special people unto himself, above all the people that are upon the face of the earth’ (Deut. 7: 6). The patriarch Noah condemned Canaan, one of Ham’s sons and his descendents to be ‘a servant of servants ... unto his brethren’ (Gen. 9: 25-27). This verse was used by the Israelites to sanction their subjugation of the Canaanites when they conquered the Promised Land and later by both Christians and Muslims to justify their slavery of blacks.

Other groups generated their own religious justifications for separateness. The Aryan or Indo-European people who invaded India 2,500 years ago built up a complex caste system to preserve their original physical type. They began to compose the Rig-Veda, a distillation of their religious beliefs. Eventually these were combined in the Upanishads (composed c. 800 RC., first written c. 1300 A.D.) which, among other things, placed strong social barriers against free hybridization. The caste system may have been the most elaborate and effective barrier against the mixing of contiguous ethnic groups that the world has ever known. It continues to this day despite the attempts of governments to dismantle it. Nonetheless, the once fair complexions of the Brahmans have darkened considerably.

At the Battle of Blood River in Zululand, South Africa, on Sunday, December 16, 1838, the White Boer Voortrekkers entered into a covenant with God. If he would deliver them from the overwhelming numbers of Zulu warriors that surrounded them, they would observe the day as an anniversary every year and conduct their lives in accord with the spirit of the covenant. In the battle, 4,000 Zulu soldiers armed with assegai and shields were killed while one member of the small force of Boer soldiers, armed with rifles and a cannon, suffered a cut hand. The Boer nation had become a theocracy.

Caucasoids, of course, are not the only ethnocentrics. It is impossible to understand modem Africa without comprehending the nature of tribal rivalry. For example, The Times Higher Education Supplement (August 30, 1985: 8) reported that the Kenyan government had warned lecturers and administrators at the University of Nairobi to stop awarding higher marks to students of their own tribe.

The character yi, ‘barbarian,’ has been the normal Chinese word applied to all non-Chinese peoples for over 2,000 years. The Chinese had always felt superior to the rest of the world, long before women of the Roman Empire craved the alluring effects of Chinese silk to the point of alarming the Roman Senate about the drain on its treasury. The European traders, priests, and soldiers who came later gave the Chinese no reason to

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doubt their judgment about themselves. The very name that the Chinese called their country, Chung Kuo, the centrally located ‘Middle Kingdom,’ from whence culture radiated outward, was ethnocentric. Today China is convinced that her communism is the only right and true communism, and that her way out of communism is the only right and true way forward.

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Islamic Ethnology

Hostility and hybridization both characterized ethnic relations among those ancient Middle Eastern groups who affected history -- the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Israelites, the Hittites, the Persians, and later, the Greeks and the Romans. The nobility and leadership of the varying factions often urged against hybridization. The Bible provides many examples of the Hebrews being enjoined to avoid it. Tribes and nations thought it natural and legitimate to despise, conquer, enslave, and displace each other. Slavery is attested from the very earliest written records among the Sumerians, the Babylonians, and the Egyptians, as well as the Greeks and the Romans. The wall paintings of ancient Egypt, for example, typically depict the gods and pharaohs as larger than life while Negroes and other outlanders were posed as servants and slaves.

In the seventh century A.D. Islam arose among the Arabs. Under them, and later under the Ottoman Turks, a universal civilization was created from the Atlantic Ocean to China, and from Europe to West Africa. The creation through conquest of far-flung empires into which different races and ethnic groups were pulled, especially through the institution of slavery, led to a considerable body of writing, extending over almost a thousand years, about the characteristics of the various groups. Written in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, discussion focused on the suitability of various races for different tasks and occupations.

Among Arabs, where intense tribal loyalties spilled over into feuding and warfare, there existed the usual ethnocentrism. In his book Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Lewis (1990) examined the common stereotypes that emerged for various national groups. In early Arabic poetry, many nuances of human coloration are described. The Arabs saw their own olive coloring as generally preferable to either the redder color of the Persians, Greeks, and Europeans or to the black and brown peoples of the Horn of Africa and beyond. As Ibn al-Fagih al-Hamadani, an Iraqi Arab author put it around A.D. 902: ‘The Iraqis are neither half-baked dough nor burned crust but between the two’ (cited in Lewis, 1990: 46). One exception was the preference for blondes as concubines; these typically brought the highest prices.

Sa’id al-Andalusi (d. 1070), writing from the then Muslim city of Toledo in Spain, classified ten nations as having achieved distinction in cultivating civilization: the Indians, Persians, Chaldees, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Arabs, Jews, Chinese, and Turks. But the northern as well as the southern barbarians were seen as more like beasts than men. It was thought that the Slavs and Bulgars, because of their distance from the sun, had a frigid temperament and dull intelligence. In the South Sa’id thought that the blacks, because of the hot thin air, lacked ‘self control and steadiness of mind and are overcome by fickleness, foolishness, and ignorance’ (cited in Lewis, 1990: 47-48).

Lewis (1990) examined Arabic relations with blacks with whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1,000 years. Although the Koran stated there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most

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respected, the ‘Zanj’ (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with the Nubians occupying an intermediate position.

The negative views of black people are traced by Lewis (p. 52) to Mas’udi (d. 956) who quoted the Greek physician Galen (A.D. c. 130-c. 200) attributing to the black man ‘a long penis and great merriment. Galen says that merriment dominates the Black man because of his defective brain, whence also the weakness of his intelligence.’ This description is later repeated, with variations.

Most Arab geographers speak of the nudity, paganism, cannibalism, and primitive life of the Africans, particularly of the Bantu-speakers of East Africa alongside Zanzibar, which the Arabs had colonized in 925 A.D. Maqdisi depicted blacks as having the nature ‘of wild animals ... most of them go naked ... the child does not know his father, and they eat people’ (cited in Lewis, 1990: 52). A thirteenth-century Persian writer, Nasir al-Din Tusi, remarks that Negroes differ from animals only in that ‘their two hands are lifted above the ground ... the ape is more teachable and more intelligent’ (cited in Lewis, 1990: 53). In the fourteenth century, Ibn Butlan held a musical rhythm stereotype, suggesting that if an African ‘were to fall from heaven to earth he would beat time as he goes down’ (cited in Lewis, p. 94); another stereotype held that black people may be particularly pious because of their simplicity.

Throughout Islamic literature there is also the image of unbridled, sexual potency in blacks, as related, for example, in stories and illustrations from The Thousand and One Nights. Black females, as well as males, are portrayed with greatly endowed genitalia. One Persian manuscript from 1530 A.D. (Lewis, 1990: 97, and color plate no. 23) contains a pictorial illustration accompanying a poem in which a white woman watches while her black maidservant is able to accommodate to copulation with an ass; when the white woman tries do so, there are disastrous consequences.

In the main, black people are considered destined for menial occupations. Whereas slaves and their offspring from other parts of the empire were able to, and did, rise to the highest levels of office, black slaves did so rarely. Black slaves were seen as unintelligent, a view not held of non-African slaves, nor of those on the empires’ borders, including the European Christians, the Indian Hindus, and the Chinese.

Racial characteristics were often attributed to the environment. Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) whom Lewis describes as the greatest historian and social thinker of the Middle Ages, devoted a chapter to climatic effects. Even the merriment attributed to black people was considered climatic rather than genetic in origin (Lewis, p. 47). One writer, Jahiz of Basra (ca. 776-869) attributed the widely perceived low intelligence of black people to their existing socioeconomic position and asked his readers whether they would have anticipated the existence of the achievements in Indian science, philosophy, and art from their

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experience of Indian slaves. Since the reply was likely to be no, then the same argument might apply to black lands (cited in Lewis, p. 31).


Reference: Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)