How can racism and equality go hand in hand? Philosophers of the eighteenth century argued for equality between people. But at the same time they divided man into races for the first time. However, new research shows that they had very different intentions with race than what it turned out to be in the nineteenth century:racism.
How is it that in the eighteenth century intellectuals committed to equality between people, but also began to categorize people into races? We even call the period the Age of Reason. It seems a paradox, but according to cultural historian Devin Vartija (Utrecht University) it is not, who has investigated this parallel development. The answer can be found in the nineteenth century, according to the researcher.
Determinant hierarchy
People are not equal. Until the Enlightenment, an important cultural movement of the eighteenth century, this was the prevailing idea. The hierarchy in society was determined by God, or so Christians thought. The king was the deputy of God at the head, followed by clergy and nobles and at the bottom of the majority of society:the common people. Discrimination between different groups was common, for example due to different legal systems. The word of someone who was above you in the hierarchy had more weight than yours. Inequality and a life full of suffering was simply the result of the sinful nature of man and a punishment from God.
Enlightenment philosophers questioned this practice. They met in teahouses and salons to discuss other options and wrote books about them. Vartija:“Although they differed on what they meant by equality – most meant only men – they believed that equality before the law was necessary for a just society.”
With the arrival of more wealthy and literate citizens, these ideas and books spread over an ever-growing group. Inequality gradually became less self-evident for them, which would eventually lead to the French Revolution in 1789, with the slogan 'liberty, equality and fraternity'. Vartija:“For my research I mainly looked at the Enlightenment in France, where the king and nobles were in charge and this discussion was strongest. In the Netherlands, a republic, the situation was different. There the richer citizens had more power and this mattered less.”
Classification breeds
But alongside these philosophies of equality, the same Enlightenment thinkers first categorized people by race. You would say that this is at odds with each other. Vartija, however, contradicts this:“The philosophers saw humans as part of nature rather than God's creation. According to them, the external differences between people were caused by the different climates in which people lived.”
“For example, the philosopher Dennis Buffon argued that Africans had such black skin because of the extreme heat in Africa. Therefore, the Spaniards were lighter than the Africans and the Germans even whiter. Little sun equals little color.” These kinds of theories also called into question the age of the earth and its creatures:the six thousand years indicated by the Bible could not possibly be correct when nature influenced the appearance of people.
Civilized or not?
Even before the Enlightenment, thinkers wrote negatively about people outside Europe, but because of their religion or degree of civilization, not because of the color of their skin. Chinese, on the other hand, were seen as very civilized and sometimes even more civilized. According to the Enlightenment philosophers, Europeans emerged as winners because of the favorable conditions. Everyone could achieve what the Europeans had achieved, provided they lived in the same favorable conditions.
So they did not see race as a justification for inequality, Vartija discovered. With the division of humanity into different races, they tried to explain the history of man and to give his development a place in it. Outward appearances did not make people less, although some thinkers did judge them. “Some races they described as barbaric, ugly or retarded. Negative associations with races already existed in the eighteenth century," says Vartija.
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Racism as we know it, in which the black race is inferior to the white, originated in the nineteenth century according to Vartija, as a direct result of slavery in the United States. “In America, for the first time in the world, the right to liberty and equality was enshrined in the Constitution of 1787. Keeping slaves was at odds with this. Southern plantation owners, however, saw slaves as a necessity to keep the economy going. They therefore used appearances for the first time as a justification for inequality:dark Africans were inferior to whites. The constitution, containing freedom and equality for all, therefore did not apply to them.”
The Americans went back to the racial classification of the Enlightenment period. They excluded Africans from the group to which the equality norms applied on the basis of external characteristics. Enlightenment thinkers, however, had not used race as a justification or explanation for inequality and thus are not at the origin of racism; the concept of race has changed over time.
Empathy through reading
For his research, Vartija has thoroughly studied the texts of three encyclopedias:the Cyclopaedia by Ephraim Chambers, the Encyclopédie by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, and Encyclopédie d'Yverdon by Fortunato Bartolomeo De Felice. With this he looked at the Enlightenment thinkers from France, England and Switzerland from the beginning to the end of the eighteenth century. “I used encyclopedias because they were important and increasingly popular resources at the time. Because they are reference works, you can find in them what was generally accepted.”
“Buffon's work was extremely popular and was in the top five of French private libraries in the second half of the century. Reading books is perhaps the main reason for the ideas about equality to catch on. Books about other cultures or people from other classes created more empathy among the readers for these groups.” But not everyone agreed with the Enlightenment philosophers and their innovative ideas about human history, especially the church. And the common man on the street probably didn't care at all, thinks Vartija. Rather, he was trying to survive.