Part three of the series “Clarity in Our Use of the Term ‘Racism’.” Sometimes wearing metal helmets and/or body armor and carrying firearms and/or bringing cannons and other weaponry that was unknown to the people whose lands they were encroaching upon: these hornets with the pale skin wore out the weapon mats pretty quick. In many cases, if not most, the people they encountered either welcomed them or tolerated their arrival. But before long, they would learn of the treachery of the newcomers. In his book, The Black Indians, William Lauren Katz shares with us some of what Cristóbal Colón, Christopher Columbus, had to say about his encounters with Native people. Citing his October 12, 1492 diary entry, Katz informs us of the explorers taking up some natives by force. To quote from The Black Indians, “He started by shipping 10 chained Arawak men and women to Seville, Spain. He wrote enthusiastically to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella about the business possibilities: ‘From here, in the name of the Blessed Trinity, we can send all the slaves that can be sold’.”
Subsequently, he loaded 1100 Taino men and women aboard four Spanish ships. Because of the crowding, Atlantic storms, and other conditions, only 300 arrived. Before Colón and his actions on behalf of Spain, there was Prince Henry. Tony Browder in his work Nile Valley Contributions to Civilization, reveals Prince Henry of Portugal took the Africans and sold them as slaves in the ports of Portugal. He asked absolution for the seamen and Pope Eugenia the Fourth, in 1442, granted the request. By 1452, Pope Nicholas V gave King Alfonso of Spain general powers to enslave so-called pagans, and of course, pagans meant the Africans who didn’t yet know Christ.
How is it that a human being believes he has a right to enslave, steal from, kidnap, brutalize, murder, and otherwise mistreat another human being? If a person is greedy, ruthless, and aggressive, that’s about all that’s needed, but in talking about the slave trade; imperialism and colonialism, ushered in and expanded, by the dominant European countries, there’s another element. The African scholar and historian John Henry Clark called it “white nationalism.” At some point, the French, English, Spanish, and other Europeans who were exhibiting their greed, ruthlessness, aggression, and so forth in Africa, the Americas, and elsewhere, noticed that they had something very obvious in common: a lack of pigment or whiteness. Of course, this shared paleness of skin had not served to mitigate, in the least, a propensity toward violence and frequent wars between and within the countries of Europe. But, with regards to European contact with lands populated by people of color, rather, there was so much wealth to be made from the raw materials and from the sale of human beings, there had to be something other than the characteristically European “every man for himself way of doing things.
The enslaving, theft of land and resources, murders, and exterminations required some level of organization. The Christian churches and the Roman Catholic Church, in particular, provided leadership in this regard. We know, for example, that the Vatican served as a veritable referee in the early period of Spain’s and Portugal’s competition for reaping the riches of the so-called New World. We know from Nile Valley Contributions that so controlling was the power of the Vatican and the conduct of trade into Africa, that in 1481, Edward the lV of England asked the Pope for permission to trade in Africa. That Christianity played such a significant role institutionally in the slave trade, imperialism, and colonialism should not surprise us when the various Europeans in Africa and the Americans looked at each other, it was not only whiteness they had in common, but also their belief in Jesus Christ and the concept of Christianity.
To get a more concrete picture of how tightly whiteness and Christianity were entwined, consider the following passage from Stanley M Elkins, Slavery, 2nd edition: “According to South Carolina Code of 1712, the punishment for offering any violence to any Christian or white person by striking or the like, was a severe whipping for the first offense, banning for the second, and death for the third. Should the white man attacked, be injured, or maimed, the punishment was automatically death. The same act provided that a runaway slave be “severely whipped for his first defense, branded for his second, his ears put out for the third, and castrated for the fourth”. That concludes part three.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
