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

voked resistance from the religiously orthodox by presenting
reams of “scientific” evidence to support the proposition
that the country’s three main races—whites, blacks,
and American Indians—belonged to separately created and
vastly unequal species. 29
In France ethnological discourse was uninhibited by
Protestant evangelicalism and could take a more radical
turn than in Britain or even the United States. Polygenesis,
or more generally the view that the differences that made
the races unequal were of great magnitude and unalterable,
had the support of leading French scientists and intellectuals,
beginning with Henri de Saint-Simon’s justification of
Napoleon’s reenslavement policy. The revolutionaries had
made a mistake, Saint-Simon wrote a year after the rescinding
of emancipation, when they “applied the principle
of equality to the Negroes.” If they had asked men of science,
“they would have learned that the Negro in accordance
with his formation, is not susceptible under equal
conditions of education of being raised to the same level of
intelligence as [the] European.” 30 A leading French advocate
of polygenesis, who later influenced proslavery writers in
the United States, was Jean-Joseph Virey, whose “scientific”
conclusions about blacks included the assertions that they
copulated with apes in Africa and had brains and blood the
same color as their skin. 31 Polygenetic theory dominated
French anthropology right through the second emancipation
of colonial slaves in the 1840s. The proceedings of the
Ethnological Society of Paris for 1841–1847 contain extreme
racist statements that aroused little dissent. The aesthetic
aspect of blacks’ inferiority was not forgotten in the
increased attention to their intellectual shortcomings. Ac-
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