american-holocaust

278 APPENDIX IIearly years of settlement-those years when Indian men, women, and childrenwere being butchered, burned alive, enslaved, poisoned en masse, andreferred to as "wild beasts," "brutish savages," and "viperous broods"­and so, according to Vaughan's ad hoc definition, the British did not thenthink of the Indians they were systematically liquidating as "inherentlyinferior." 26As with Fredrickson's impossibly narrow definition of racism, so withVaughan it needs to be pointed out that neither skin color distinctions norpseudoscientific ideas of biological determinism are necessary criteria forthe categorization and degradation of people under the rubric of "race."Even a glance at the standard etymologies of the word ("the outward raceand stocke of Abraham"; "to be the Race of Satan"; "the British race";"that Pygmean Race"-to cite some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century examples)clearly shows that the term "race" was in widespread use in Britainto denote groups of people and classes of things marked by characteristicsother than color well before it was used exclusively in that way, andcenturies before it had grafted upon it the elaborate apparatus of biologicaland zoological pseudoscience. Indeed, a sense of "racial" superioritysometimeshaving to do with color and sometimes not-had been imbeddedin English consciousness at least since the appearance in the twelfthcentury of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, thegreat elaboration of the Arthurian legend. 27It is true, as noted several times in Chapter Six of this book, that racistthought and behavior by whites toward Indians intensified during the courseof the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but after the first few decadesof the sixteenth century-at the very latest-the escalation of racism wasa change in degree, not type (as Vaughan claims), of prejudice and oppression.In sum, there is little doubt that the dominant sixteenth- andseventeenth-century ecclesiastical, literary, and popular opinion in Spainand Britain and Europe's American colonies regarding the native peoplesof North and South America was that they were a racially degraded andinferior lot-borderline humans as far as most whites were concerned. Althoughthere was, even at that early date, beginning to emerge in Europevarious detailed theories of racist pseudoscience, anyone who has ever beenon the receiving end of racist aggression knows that such endeavors donot require of their perpetrators the presence of formal scientific or otherdoctrine; as W.E.B. DuBois once observed: "the chief fact [in my life] hasbeen race-not so much scientific race, as that deep conviction of myriadsof men that congenital differences among the main masses of human beingsabsolutely condition the individual destiny of every member of a group." 28Most people of color today, as well as for centuries past, would haveunderstood what DuBois was saying-even if some modern white historiansapparently do not.