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

apparently already being made. According to historian
James H. Sweet, it was during the period when Christians
and Muslims coexisted in Iberia that the former learned
from the latter to identify blackness with servitude. 23
Historians Bernard Lewis and William McKee Evans
have presented much evidence to support the view that the
Islamic world preceded the Christian in representing sub-
Saharan Africans as descendants of Ham, who were cursed
and condemned to perpetual bondage because of their ancestor’s
mistreatment of his father, Noah, as described in
an obscure passage in Genesis. 24 Although medieval Arabs
and Moors had white slaves as well as black and thus did
not practice the purely racial slavery that Europeans carried
to the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
they generally assigned blacks the most menial and
degrading tasks. In southern Iberia the most conspicuous
slaves of light-skinned or tawny Moorish masters were
black Africans, and it was natural for Christians, as well as
Muslims, to begin to associate sub-Saharan African ancestry
with lifetime servitude. When Portuguese navigators
acquired slaves of their own as a result of their voyages
along the Guinea Coast in the mid- to late fifteenth century
and offered them for sale in the port cities of Christian Iberia,
the identification of black skins with servile status was
complete. Hence even before the discovery of America,
some Iberian Christians were more likely to conceive of
blacks as destined by God to be “hewers of wood and carriers
of water” than to view them as exemplars of the Christian
virtues. 25
The fact that Europeans were ceasing to enslave other
Europeans at the time when African slaves became sud-
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