Race and Racism

The European enlightenment was a time where scholars classified everything, from plants to animals to people. These scholars put people into categories based on arbitrary differences and unjustified claims of inferiority. This type of thinking created five races putting whites at the top as the pure and intelligent and blacks at the bottom as corrupted and obtuse. The concepts of race and racism developed and as new races of people were ‘discovered’ by Europeans, the ideal of white supremacy emerged.

As Europeans traveled and came into contact with other races, they felt more of a need to classify the ‘other’ as inferior. In Plato’s Republic it says, “Then surely such persons would hold the shadows of those manufactured articles to be the only realities... How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?” This quote refers to the idea that humans are comfortable with what they know. In Plato’s cave allegory, shadows refer to what one is accustomed to. If one is surrounded by shadows they will assume that shadows are the only good and be fearful of anything else. White people were accustomed to being around other white people and when they came into contact with black people they assumed that black was inferior.

Although pre-colonial Africa was a large continent with numerous different tribes, each with their own unique traditions, languages, and cultures, European settlers reduced all Africans to one category, black. Cultural and historical differences were seemingly wiped away by white colonization, and by denying the complexities of Africa and its nations, as well as by claiming racial superiority, Europeans justified racial slavery. This new form of slavery dehumanized a race of people. Degrading them to subhuman entities incapable of anything more then manual labor and servitude.

As racial slavery became ingrained in western culture, so did the concepts of racism. It is impossible to have racial slavery without racism. Slave, inferior, and black became one and the same. Despite these three words having very different definitions in the dictionary, they became synonymous in the 18^th. Slaves in the 18^th century were black bodies to be used and discarded as needed. Blacks were seen as unintelligent and subhuman, with some scholars debating whether or not they were even of the human species. Racial slavery perpetuated these ideas of black inferiority while simultaneously encouraging white supremacy.