1. FIRST CONTACT IN 1554

Winthrop Jordan begins with the fact of difference between the English and the West Africans. On page 5 he points out that the first West Africans who are documented to have been taken to London appeared there in 1554. In that year it is reported that five "Negroes" were taken to England, kept there until they could speak English, and then carried back to Africa where they could help Englishmen engaged in trade on the coast of Africa.
 

2. THE ENGLISH ATTITUDE WAS DIFFERENT THAN THE SPANISH

Jordan also believes that the attitude of the English was different from that of the Spanish and Portuguese. On page 5 he says "the English experience was markedly different from that of the Spanish and Portuguese, who for centuries had been in close contact with North Africa and had actually been invaded and subjected by people both darker and more "highly civilized" than themselves." By 1500 the Spanish and Portuguese had developed a sense of religious superiority. They felt that Catholicism was the one true religion, and that Catholic Christians were superior to "heathens" or "pagans." In time the Spanish and Portuguese sense of superiority based on religion (we are superior because we possess the one true religion) would become a sense of superiority based on race and color (we are superior because we are white Europeans or our ancestors were white Europeans). But it was more difficult for the Spanish and Portuguese to pretend that darker people had never produced any civilization. They knew better than that.

3. SUDDENNESS OF CONTACT

But Jordan argues that the English had never had any contact with the Moors or the people of Africa. For them contact was sudden. And although the English called the Moors black, they sometimes called the West Africans blackmoors or blackamoors to express the fact that the West Africans were darker than the Moors.

Comment: We also need to bear in mind that after the fall of Rome the "Dark Ages" descended on Europe for a good 500 years. Most Europeans were illiterate. Even some of the kings could not write. A handful of monks sheltering behind the walls of monastaries preserved learning and literacy. England in particular was isolated from the rest of the world and knew little about anything beyond western Europe. In this climate, ignorance and superstition flourished. The English became like ignorant children who thought stupid things, but they just didn't know any better.

4. DIFFERENCES

 The English noted several differences between themselves and the West Africans.
 

A) COLOR

Obviously, the most noticeable difference was color. The Negroes looked different. Their complexion was different. Jordan writes, on p. 5, "The impact of the Negro's color was the more powerful upon Englishmen...because England's principal contact with the Africans came in West Africa and the Congo, which meant that one of the lightest-skinned of the earth's people suddenly came face to face with one of the darkest."

b) FOODS

The English also observed other differences. The Africans ate different foods, such as gazelle, antelope, zebra, elephant. And they did not use forks as the English elite did. The Africans used bread to sop up juice, and ate with their hands. The English considered this barabaric, animal-like, and uncivilized.

C) DIFFERENT DRESS OR CLOTHING

Because of the hot climate they wore fewer clothes, and the English considered them almost naked. In some societies women wore fewer clothes than in Europe. European men were "scandalized" to see women's breasts, and more "leg" and "thigh." In cold Europe people were covered up much of the time, and might not bathe regularly.

D) DIFFERENT RELIGION

The West Africans were Animists. They believed in a Creator God but thought that there were lesser or helper gods, and gods of nature (sun, moon, river, storms) and good and evil spirits. They were polytheistic. The Africans also honored their ancestors, and believed that the ancestors continued to "live" as spirits in the afterlife. So their religion was different from the monotheistic religion of the Europeans. Therefore the English considered them heathens or pagans. They thought of Animism as devil-worship, and thought the Africans had no proper religion or did not believe in God. The Africans honored and revered their ancestors, but the Europeans thought the Africans worshiped their ancestors.

E) LANGUAGE

Of course the language of the Africans was different, as was their culture and traditions. To the English this was "gibberish" or monkeytalk.

F) DIFFERENT MARITAL PATTERNS AND SEXUALITY

The Africans were polygamous, which meant that a man might have two or three or several wives. To the English this suggested that the Africans were hyper-sexual or oversexed. They developed the idea that black men were super-sexual, and black women were sexually aggressive and promiscuous and lascivious. On p. 19 Jordan describes how the English developed the idea that black men had "large propogators," and indeed in the play Othello William Shakespeare (1564-1616) had described Othello the Moor as a "Barbary horse" (Jordan, p. 21). This is a sexual reference (he was "hung like a horse"). The English thought African women were nymphomaniacs.

G) SCARIFICATION

Some African tribes also put tattoos or lines on their faces or in their head, somewhat like tattoos, but usually it was a diagonal line or pattern. Typically this involved a cut or laceration or pin pricks that left a scar. These were tribal markings, and you could identify a person's tribe or clan from these designs. This is called scarification. To the English this suggested cosmetic mutilation and savagery. They thought it was some kind of sado-masochism thing.
 

5. THE SYMBOLIC MEANING OF COLORS

In English culture, for centuries, the color black had certain symbolic meanings. Even before the 1500s, symbolically the color black represented evil. In English culture it meant deeply stained with dirt, dirty, soiled, foul, malignant. It meant pertaining to death (at funerals people dressed in black). It meant sinister and wicked. It was associated with disgrace and punishment. Thus in English anything bad was called black. Thus a black cat was bad luck. There were words such as in blackmail, blacklist, black ball.

In contrast, for centuries, in English culture, the color white had been associated with anything good or pure. White and red were the standards of beauty.

The color white was associated with good, and the color black with evil. Thus people spoke of white magic and black magic. If you told a harmless little fib it was a white lie, but a gross untruth was a black lie. A white dove is a symbol of peace, a wedding dress is white to symbolize chastity and purity. A black cat is a symbol of bad luck. By the Elizabethan Period (b. 1533, r. 1558-1603), when Elizabeth I reigned in England, the association of good with the color white, and evil with the color black, was well-established and deeply entrenched. Shakespeare (1564-1616) wrote during the reign of Elizabeth.

6.A CULTURAL PREDISPOSITION TO VIEW ANYTHING DARK NEGATIVELY

Winthrop Jordan argues that when the English encountered people who were dark, who were black, they automatically projected these negative meanings of the COLOR black onto them. The English did not meet dark people and THEN develop a negative meaning of the color black. Rather in their culture they already had a negative association with the color black-- before they had ever seen or met an actual dark person. For this reason they were predisposed to view darkness negatively. When they encountered people who were dark they projected the pre-existing negative meaning of blackness onto these people. It is almost as if the English were prejudiced against anything that was dark or black in color even before they ever met or saw a dark person.
 

7. EXPLANATIONS OF DARKNESS

A) PHAETON MYTH

The English began to try to explain how the Africans had gotten dark. First it was said (p. 7) that in Greek mythology there was the story of Phaeton, the son of the sun-god, Helios. One day Phaeton had driven the sun-chariot too close to the earth and the people in Africa had been burned or scorched. It was not that the Africans had gotten too close to the sun (Icarus), but that the sun had come too close to them. So this was one explanation.

B) PROXIMITY TO THE SUN

The ancient Greek writer Ptolemy had said exposure to the hot sun caused the skin to darken and the hair to become woolly. But the Indians of South America were near the equator but they were not as dark as the Africans, so proximity to the equator didn't seem to be the whole answer. Furthermore, if proximity to the equator and the sun was the cause of blackness, then Europeans should turn black at the equator and Africans in northern latitudes should get lighter. But that didn't seem to happen either. The English came to regard blackness as permanent and innate.

C) BESTIALITY

Having lived in isolation in England for so long, the English had never encountered chimpanzees and gorillas. These animals are not monkeys. They are primates that do not have tails. Unfortunately the English learned about these animals, which they called orangutans, at the same time that they encountered dark complected West Africans. The English believed that Adam and the first humans had all been white. In their ignorance, the English began to suspect that in ancient times white people had mated with the chimpanzees, and the black Africans were the offspring that resulted from these unions. The English especially believed that chimps found human females very attractive. This gave rise to myths about bestiality between white people and apes and chimpanzees (p. 15). The English suspected that Africans had resulted from the union of chimpanzees and white human females. In the 1700s even Thomas Jefferson wrote about chimpanzees desiring humans as if it were fact.

D) THE STORY OF HAM

The English knew that the Spanish had been using Africans as slaves in the Caribbean since 1505. Therefore they reasoned that the Negroes were the descendants of Ham, the son of Noah. In Genesis, Chapter 9, verse 20, it says "Noah was the first tiller of the soil. He planted a vineyard and he drank wine, and became drunk, and lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it upon their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father; their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father's nakedness. When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said,

Cursed be Canaan:

a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers
(some translate this as servant of servants)

He also said,
Blessed by the Lord my God be Shem
and let Canaan be his slave
God enlarge Japheth
and let him dwell in the tents of Shem
and let Canaan be his slave

Apparently Ham's sin was to disrespect his father by not covering him up, and leaving him there naked. And it is curious that the curse was placed on Ham's son, Canaan, rather than on Ham himself. Perhaps punishing the son would hurt Ham more than if Noah had punished Ham himself. But to me all of this is quite obscure. Of course if you have a more original or creative interpretation you are certainly welcome to it.

English theologians took this story and said that the Africans were the descendants of Ham and Canaan, and they had been cursed by God to be slaves. The identification of the Africans as the descendants of Ham was based on the fact that the Spanish and Portuguese were using them as slaves. But please note that in the story from Genesis it does not say a single word at all, explicitly, about color or race. This was "read in," implicitly, because in Scripture Ham was the father of Egypt, Kush (Nubia) and Put (Libya) as well as Canaan, and of course Kush was a black society and Egypt and Put (Libya) are also in Africa and they mostly likely were "mixed race." The explicit reference to Canaan as becoming black got read into the story later ( in 1577 in English).

E) THE GEORGE BEST VERSION OF THE HAM MYTH

In 1577 George Best wrote a new version of the Ham story, as described by Jordan on p. 23. Best said that when Noah went on board the Ark he ordered that no one should have sex. In the catastrophe of the Great Flood everyone should abstain. According to Best, Noah and his sons and the wives were all white. But Ham disobeyed Noah. He could not control his sexual urges. More than this, he was driven by greed and ambition. He thought that if he fathered the first child after the Flood, his child would inherit all the dominions of the earth. "To punish this disobedience and this wicked and detestable fact, God willed that a son shall be born whose name shall be Chus, who not only itself but all his posterity after him [all his descendants] shall be so black and loathsome that it might be a spectacle of disobedience to all the world. And of [or from] this black and cursed Chus came all these black Moors which are in Africa." Note that here blackness itself is seen as a curse, as negative.

Thus it is George Best, a navigator, in 1577, who writes down in the English language the story that God placed a curse on the son of Ham, and the curse was that he was to be born black and all his descendants would be black. In the popular mind these two stories (the Biblical account and the George Best version) got compressed together and so blackness and slavery become a curse from God on the descendants of Ham. This would then be used as a justification for so-called Negro slavery.

To the English blackness was ugly. The woolly hair of black people they described as horrid curls. To the English blackness was a curse from God, and the enslavement of black people was divinely ordained. It was the will of God. It was a divine punishment. And who could question the will of God.

The English may have been simply following the bad example of the Spanish and Portuguese. By the late 1400s there were black "slaves" in Florence and Pisa in Italy, but they were probably house servants and not plantation slaves. After 1450 the Spanish and Portuguese used Africans on plantations in southern Spain and Portugal and as dock workers and transport workers.

In Morocco, the Moroccan Arabs (Moslems) had an oral tradition that Ham had looked upon his father Noah while Noah was bathing (perhaps in a river) and Noah had cursed Ham's son to be turned black. And the myth of Noah placing a curse on a son of Ham, thus turning him black, was first recorded in an ancient text from about 500 or 600 AD called the Babylonian Talmud. It was an ancient Jewish text that said that Ham had castrated Noah. Noah in turn then cursed Ham's son to be black, as a punishment for what Ham supposedly had done to his father Noah. This text was rejected by the early Christian church fathers, who translated the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek and Latin (the New Testament was written in Greek). It is possible that George Best was re-inscribing this old folklore when he wrote his version of the Ham story in 1577. He did not INVENT the story. He was simply the person who re-introduced it again or passed it on, in writing, in the English language. But this story took deep roots in the popular mind of the British people, and they brought these anti-black ideas with them to America when they came in 1607. It seems that anti-black feeling may have had deep roots in European culture that go back even further than the Elizabethan period (1558-1603) or even the 1400s. Some scholars have suggested that the fear of blackness (the color black) is a reflection of a fear of the dark, as in being afraid of the dark, at night. This was an ancient fear.

It bears repeating that the English had lived in such isolation for so long that they developed these stupid and ignorant ideas, but sadly they just didn't know any better. It was as if they were uninformed children (but children with guns and cannon and powerful technology, which made them dangerous).

8. UNFAVORABLE ASSESSMENT LEADS TO PREJUDICE, THEN RACISM

What we see here is evidence of unfavorable assessment, or a negative evaluation of anything that is black or dark in color. These stereotypes and this unfavorable assessment of difference are the beginnings of prejudice. Part of Jordan's point is that it is almost as if the English were, in a sense, already prejudiced against anything dark before they had ever met or seen a real live dark person. English prejudice actually preceded slavery in the English-speaking world. (Elizabeth I reigned 1558-1603; Shakespeare lived 1564-1616). Already in the 1560s, fifty years before the founding of Jamestown in 1607, well before the English had any colonies, they were prejudiced against things dark. There is not a great deal of evidence to show that significant numbers of Africans were in England itself as slaves after 1450 (by which time there were African slaves in Portugal) or in 1500 or 1550. However, once slavery began to occur in the English-speaking world it intensified and accelerated the prejudice and made it much, much worse. Prejudice would eventually develop into institutional racism.

The English saw blackness or dark complexion as a misfortune, as a shame, as ugly. It was negative. But once they started down this slippery slope, they proceeded from a negative assessment of difference, to prejudice, and from there toward institutional racism. Chattel slavery and life servitude is definitely a form of institutional racism. When the English came to America in 1607 they brought their prejudices with them. By 1661 Virginia and Maryland were writing slavery into the law.
 
 

Negative                     Prejudice                     Institutional
Assessment                                                     Racism
of Difference

By the 1660s the English would go on to define Africans or black people as brutes, as savages, as heathens, as animals. They would begin to define them as inferior, and as less than human. They would end up defining blacks as an inferior, sub-human species. And this would be used as the justification for chattel slavery, a form of servitude that denied the very humanity of the slave.

PROJECTION

Jordan also says that the English had things that they did not like about themselves and could not accept or face up to. Collectively, they were a people who did not necessarily like all of what they saw when they looked into the mirror. Many of the English people denied and repressed the qualities that they did not like about themselves, and then in their minds transferred or projected those qualities onto black people. So if English people could not accept or admit the truth about their own lust for black women and their desire to violate black women, they lied to themselves and accused black men of lusting after white women. To give a different hypothetical example: If I want to steal YOUR car, I will become convinced that you are plotting to steal MY car. In other words, I suspect you of wanting to do to me what I really secretly want to do to you. I project MY motives onto you, and then accuse YOU of harboring bad thoughts about me. This is like a guilty conscience. It plays tricks on our minds. To put it differently, the English became paranoid about "blacks." Whatever the English hated about themselves, they projected onto black people and then proceeded to hate black people. Thus, Jordan suggests that what the English (and later, white Americans) hated in black people was merely a projection of what white people hated about themselves. Whites hated things in blacks that reminded them of things about themselves that they did not like.

FRANCES CRESS-WELSING

Now someone will probably raise a hand and ask. "Well, if the English said that they found darkness and color so ugly and repulsive and all that, then why is it that on the first warm day of spring and all though the summer so many Europeans and European-Americans would rush down to the beach, and out onto the lawn, to get a sun tan and try to get some color? If they dislike color so much? Isn't this contradictory? And it is a fair question. Frances Cress Welsing believes that European words are contradicted by actions that reveal the desire to get some color, even to the point of sunburn and risking melanoma (skin cancer). Frances Cress Welsing thinks that deep down inside the Europeans liked color, and felt inadequate about having so little of it. She thinks they compensated for this sense of inadequacy, and that deep down inside, psychologically, "white racial prejudice" is really based on JEALOUSY. She thinks that the Europeans were actually jealous of the Africans, and hated the Africans for having what the Europeans wanted but lacked. *

She points out the Europeans had a stereotype that African women have big breasts, while European women supposedly are "flat-chested." Even today European women get silicone implants to make their breasts look bigger, more like the breasts of black women. Some people get collagen put into their lips surgically, to make their lips look fuller and more like the lips of black people. There are stereotypes that black men have larger penises, and before VIAGRA was developed some men even got implants to try to make themselves "larger". This imagined issue of "size" can be another reason for jealousy and hatred (penis envy?). These issues can also be reasons why some people, subconsciously, may feel threatened by African or black people. Welsing speculates that a marriage between a white parent and a black or brown parent almost always produces a child with color. "Black" genes are dominant. White genes are recessive. Cress-Welsing speculates that some whites might fear "genetic annihilation." There is the stereotype that black people have rounder bodies.

For more info on this point of view see a collection of essays by Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, entitled The Isis Papers (Yssis Papers).

Final comment: Part of what Jordan is saying is that the English had certain prejudices and fears and stereotypes and negative ideas about the color black, and people who were dark, even before they ever saw or met sub-Saharan Africans; and they brought these ideas with them to America when they came in 1607. It was downhill from there, and it would take 400 years for many Euro-Americans to overcome these ideas, and move beyond them, and see the humanity of black people.