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

ONE Religion and Invention of Racism
of the Portuguese discovery of Guinea referred to a biblical
curse but confused Ham with Cain. 53
The first known invocation of the curse in English writing
was in George Best’s 1578 account of Martin Frobisher’s
voyage in search of the Northwest Passage. As Benjamin
Braude has revealed, Best felt impelled, as a promoter of
far-flung imperialist adventures, to refute climatic or environmental
theories of physical differentiation among
human beings. He worried about the tendency of such theories
to discourage English or European expansion into the
torrid or frigid parts of the earth. Would Europeans freeze,
turn black, or become antipodal monsters if they wandered
too far from home? Not, Best replied, if racial type was
immune to the effects of the physical environment—if, in
other words, racial identities were fixed for all time by divine
decree, as in the understanding of the Curse of Ham
that consigned blacks to perpetual slavery. 54
Between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth,
slave traders and those who purchased their merchandise
referred frequently, if casually and inconsistently, to the
curse as an explanation of why all their slaves happened to
be black or African. For many of them, the curse may have
helped rationalize holding black Christians in bondage. It
undoubtedly helped to inhibit condemnations of black slavery
as contrary to Holy Writ. But why was it that baptism
did not lift the curse? Jews had also been cursed—for their
alleged role in the Crucifixion—but it remained the official
view of the Catholic Church that conversion meant the remission
of this ancestral sin—although, as we have seen,
many ordinary European Catholics believed that the curse
had entered the blood. (Spanish bishops condoned discrimi-
44