Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

In conflict with this tendency toward the fear or disparagement
of black people was the medieval iconography associated
with what the French cultural historian Henri
Baudet has called “le bon Nègre.” 19 Building on scriptural
evidence that the first non-Jewish convert to Christianity
was an Ethiopian eunuch, exponents of spreading the gospel
honored black converts as living evidence of the universality
of their faith. There was an unmistakable recognition
of Otherness in this tradition; it seemed to say that even
those who are as alien and different from us as black Africans
can be brothers and sisters in Christ. 20 But in the late Middle
Ages, in the period between the latter Crusades and the
Portuguese encounter with West Africa in the mid–fifteenth
century, a favorable, sometimes glorified, image of
blacks seems to have become ascendant in the western European
mind. At roughly the same time that Jews were
being demonized, blacks—or at least some blacks—were
being sanctified.
A central element in late medieval Negrophilia was the
myth of Prester John, a non-European Christian monarch,
first identified with India, then with the Tartars, and ultimately
with the actual Christian kingdom of Ethiopia. Prester
John’s prescribed role was to join Western Christians
in the struggle against Islam, which by the time that the
association with black Africa was clearly established in the
late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries had come to
mean primarily the Turkish expansion into the Mediterranean
and southeastern Europe. Hopes for an alliance with
Ethiopia and Prester John suffered a setback in 1442 when
representatives of the Ethiopian Coptic Church refused to
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