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

nation against conversos, but only on the assumption that
many New Christians were really secret Jews and thus not
true converts. They never denied that an authentic Jewish
conversion was possible, if unlikely.) To a considerable extent,
the irreversible Curse of Ham, like the literal demonization
of the Jews, operated on the level of popular belief
and mythology rather than as formal ideology. In fact it
was refuted by learned authorities, who merely had to note
that the curse fell on Canaan specifically and not on his
brother Cush, who, according to the standard biblical exegesis
of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was the actual
progenitor of the African race. Justifications of black servitude
as a divinely ordained punishment for the descendants
of Ham or Canaan were rare or inconspicuous in the treatises
and pamphlets concerning slavery that appeared before
the nineteenth century. Some proslavery polemicists in
the antebellum United States (those who rejected scientific
racism on religious grounds) were the first to make sustained
and elaborate use of the Hamitic legend to show
that racial slavery was divinely sanctioned. 55
The lack of a serious attack on slavery before the mid–
eighteenth century made a fully developed ideological defense
unnecessary, but it did not prevent the growth of popular
attitudes and beliefs that stigmatized black people as
servile and inferior. In late-seventeenth-century Virginia a
series of laws made it clear that conversion did not entail
freedom. This legislation had the effect of changing the
rationale for slavery from heathenism to heathen ancestry
and thus served an implicitly racist function similar to that
of limpieza de sangre. To the extent that Protestants believed,
as many did by the mid– to late seventeenth century, that
45