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

ONE Religion and Invention of Racism
Canarians, thought now to have been of pre-Islamic North
African or Berber stock, were at first regarded as “wild
men” and enslaved. But the church protested that reducing
such “innocent” pagans to servitude hindered their conversion,
and the surviving indigenes were eventually freed,
converted, and successfully assimilated through intermarriage
into the Spanish settler population. 37
It is significant that when Columbus recorded his first
encounter with Native Americans, he described them as
being similar in color to the Canary Islanders. He also manifested
the bifurcated image that would characterize European
perceptions of Indians for centuries to come. Those
Indians who greeted him with apparent friendliness were
viewed as simple children of nature who would be receptive
to tutelage in civilization and Christianity. But the hostile
Indians from islands other than the ones on which Columbus
first landed were written off as “cannibals” who must
be subdued by force or exterminated. Thus was born the
dichotomy of the Indian as either a noble savage who could
be civilized or a wild beast who could at best be tamed and
at worst should be exterminated. 38
The great debate between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and
Bartolomé de Las Casas that took place in Valladolid in
1550 might be viewed as a dispute over which of Columbus’s
initial impressions was the more accurate and generalizable.
The critical question was whether Indians possessed
reason, which was taken as the essential indicator of
whether they should be accorded full human status. Sepúlveda,
applying Aristotle’s conception of “natural slavery”
to all native Americans, argued in effect that Indians
were nonrational beings who could be made useful to the
36