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

nesses to divine revelation and predestined converts. Despite
his contempt for blacks, Voltaire was generally critical
of slavery and condemned Christianity for having tolerated
it. His primary enemy was traditional religious and secular
authority, and his ethnological heresies were one small part
of a campaign to attack orthodoxy at any point where it
seemed to conflict with human reason and experience. Despite
his own prejudices, he contributed to the growth of
an antislavery based on reason rather than revelation and to
ethnic and religious tolerance as a public policy. No thinker
better illustrates the dual character of Enlightenment rationalism—its
simultaneous challenge to hierarchies based on
faith, superstition, and prejudice and the temptation it presented
to create new ones allegedly based on reason, science,
and history. 23
The role of ethnology in the debate over the abolition
of the British slave trade shows that theories denying the
unity of humankind were basically irrelevant to the policy
questions concerning slavery and race that arose at the end
of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.
Edward Long, a militantly proslavery Jamaica
planter, attempted to defend the trade on the grounds that
blacks belonged to a separate and inferior species naturally
endowed with bestial and servile qualities. But most other
proponents of the slave trade shunned his arguments. Indeed
they provided more ammunition for the opponents of
the trade than for its defenders. Abolitionists like William
Wilberforce quoted Long’s strictures on black humanity in
parliamentary speeches to illustrate the callousness, immorality,
and religious infidelity that the master-slave relationship
engendered. 24
63