american-holocaust

ON RACISM AND GENOCIDE 271Jordan's words, "scarcely more than an appurtenance of slaverysquared nicely with the hopes of those even more directly concerned withthe problem of contemporary race relations. . . . For if prejudice was naturalthere would be little one could do to wipe it out. Prejudice must havefollowed enslavement, not vice versa, else any liberal program of actionwould be badly compromised." 5There was, of course, another benefit not mentioned by Jordan thatwas gained from such a reading of the historical record. The moral coreof Western culture in general, and American culture in particular, appearedfar more favorable in the light of an interpretation that found racismto be an aberration, rather than a constant, in Western history. Thus,not only did the slavery-begot-racism scenario encourage a more optimisticbelief in the possibility of curtailing racism in the present, it also gavesupport to a relatively cheerful interpretation of the American and Europeancultural past.Not everyone was convinced, however. In 1959 Carl N. Degler publishedan article, "Slavery and the Genesis of American Race Prejudice,"strongly arguing that slavery took root very early in American colonialsociety and that it did so in large part because of the white colonists' preexistingracist attitudes-attitudes visible, among other places, in Elizabethanliterature, including Shakespeare's Othello and Titus Andronicus, butalso evident in the relative prices of black and white servants, discriminatorycourt decisions, and more. 6 The ensuing flurry of debate on the issuehad a number of internal problems, not the least of which was a tendencyto assume that the general attitudes and behaviors of the white colonistswere very nearly monolithic. Thus, whenever one partisan found an exceptionto the other's body of data he or she was likely to hold it up as arefutation of the other's entire thesis. Some writers, for example, pointedto a 1640 law prohibiting blacks in Virginia from bearing arms, and citedthis as evidence of racially based discrimination, while critics of this interpretationnoted the presence in Virginia during this same time of a blackformer slave who had gained his freedom and purchased a slave himself,and they used this as evidence that blacks were not treated with specialunfairness. Within a few years, however, Degler's general contention wasgiven an able assist by Winthrop Jordan, first in an article of his own, thenin 1968 with his massive and justly celebrated study, White Over Black:American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550- 1812. 7Examining materials ranging from biblical passages to sixteenth-centurypoetry, travelers' tales, and more, Jordan concluded in White Over Blackthat European antipathy for Africans had long pre-dated the enslavementof blacks in America, or for that matter, the arrival of Europeans to theWestern Hemisphere. "From the first," he wrote, "Englishmen tended toset Negroes over against themselves, to stress what they conceived to beradically contr:fsting qualities of color, religion, and style of life, as well as