The modern history of the Caribbean has been shaped to a large extent by racism.

Beginning during the European colonial system, the genocide of the region's Indigenous

Peoples, the enslavement of Africans, and the indenture of Indians have all been clear and

brutal manifestations of this racism. However, there is still great disagreement

concerning the origin of this racist thought. Although European in origin, it is still

debated whether racist ideology was the catalyst for genocide, enslavement and

colonization in the Caribbean, or if it was largely an invention used as a convenient

excuse for these atrocities after they had begun. The debate centers around two opposing

interpretations of the rise of imperialism and African enslavement in the Caribbean as

either primarily an economic or socio-cultural phenomenon. By examining the evolution

of European ideas of 'race' and their relationship with colonization and enslavement, the

origin of the articulation of racism in the colonial Caribbean may become clearer.

If racism is defined in the broadest of possible terms as the recognition of

differences between certain peoples and consequently treating people differently because

of these differences, then it may be said that nearly every human society on earth exhibits

a certain degree of racism. However, in the case of European contact with the outside

world in the fifteenth century, this racism was accompanied by an assumption of

superiority and the belief in a 'right to rule' over supposedly inferior peoples. This

concept helped to consolidate a powerful European Christian white identity in relation to

the rest of the world. Enslavement and imperialism were also enormously successful in

catapulting Europe to the forefront of a new world economy.

Orlando Patterson notes, "There is nothing notably peculiar about the institution

of slavery."1 The process of enslavement has existed within and between various human
1
Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. (p. vii)

1
societies for millennia. Methods of enslavement have varied over time in different

regions of the world, and occasionally before the trans-Atlantic trade this servitude was

associated with 'race'. In order to make the process possible within the social constructs

of the societies in which it has existed, the enslaved group has often been denigrated as in

some way deserving of their bondage. However, modern ideas of 'race' and 'racism' arose

during the emergence of the particularly brutal European enslavement of Africans.

Therefore, it is necessary to identify how European attitudes toward race shaped the

process of enslavement in the Caribbean and how those attitudes evolved in relation to

the progression of the slave/plantation system.

Historians disagree concerning the impact of Medieval European views of

Africans on subsequent relations between the two continents. After explaining "the

powerful impact which the Negro's color made upon Englishmen", Winthrop Jordan

explains that for Englishmen, even before contact with Africans, "Black was an

emotionally partisan color, the handmaid and symbol of baseness and evil, a sign of

danger and repulsion."2 To Medieval Europeans, Africa south of the Sahara was said to

have people with multiple heads, one eye, ten eyes or various other fantastical features. 3

James H. Sweet identifies certain derogatory ideas of black-skinned Africans as inferior

peoples, which Christian Iberians had inherited from neighbouring Muslims. 4 However,

a Spanish map dated around 1375 depicts a noble-looking king of Mali on a throne

holding a gold nugget. Other early European artistic depictions of Africans were equally

non-judgmental.5 As Jordan notes, "Initially, English contact with Africans did not take

2
Jordan, Winthrop D. White Over Black. Kingsport: University of North Carolina Press, 1968. (p. 6 & 7)
3
Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold's Ghost. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. (p. 6)
4
Sweet, James H. "The Iberian Roots of Racist Thought." in William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series,
Volume 54, Issue 1, Jan. 1997. (p. 143-166)
5
Shillington, Kevin. History of Africa. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995. (p. 100)

2
place primarily in a context which prejudged the Negro as a slave, at least not as a slave

of Englishmen. Rather, Englishmen met Negroes merely as another sort of men."6

Generally, however, although the trans-Saharan trade had linked Europe and sub-

Saharan Africa for centuries through Arab traders, Europeans had very little knowledge

of the people who lived there. This encounter with 'difference' was a mutual experience

for both the European explorers/traders and the various Africans who greeted them. In

the Americas, the situation was similar. The newness of these encounters with other

peoples, and the ignorance of the 'other' that went with it, is evidenced by Columbus's

assumption that he was in India.7 As Jordan's quotation indicates, Europeans had no

previously held ideas of Africans as a 'race of natural slaves', or even as necessarily

inherently inferior human beings, aside from their ignorance of Christianity. Although

Europeans viewed Africans as heathens for their lack of Christianity, they felt similarly

about the peoples of India, the Middle East and China, while still maintaining a great

admiration of these societies, as they did for many in Africa and even the Americas at

first.8

However, despite the admiration that European travelers from Marco Polo to

Bartolomé De Las Casas had for various societies outside of Europe, these explorers and

their rulers at home assumed a European, Christian 'right' over these foreign peoples.

Where their military might was strong enough, this took the form of outright colonialism,

such as in the Americas. Where they did not have this power, they entrenched

themselves in 'trading forts' along the coast, as in much of West Africa and the Swahili

Coast. Such expansion did not recognize the forms of government that were already in

6
Jordan, 1968 (p. 4)
7
Rogozinski, Jan. A Brief History of the Caribbean. New York: Plums Books, 2000. (p. 22)
8
Case, Frederick. Racism and National Consciousness. Toronto: Other Eye, 1977 (2002). (p. 10)

3
place, and treated the peoples of these newly conquered territories as sub-human. This

idea of the 'right to rule' seems to have been inherited from the expansionist tradition that

had defined Christian Iberian society during the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from

what Christians viewed as "their" Christian homeland. Even those who were impressed

by the Indigenous societies of the Americas and Africa believed that the paganism of

these peoples justified their subjugation under Christian authority.9

The Crusades of the eleventh century provide an excellent example of the forces

that led to imperialism and how ideas of racism were articulated. The enemy in these

conquests was Islam, and the conflict was both a political 'reclamation' of the "Holy

Land" and a result of the ideological/theological differences between Christians and

Muslims. However, as Frederick Case notes, "In order to produce enthusiasm for the

wars of conquest in the Holy Land, Christian rulers of Europe found it expedient to

negate the humanity of their far-off adversary."10 He continues, "When negation of a race

is accompanied by conquest, colonization and prolonged enslavement of that race, the

conquerors, colonizers and enslavers elaborate theories of racial and cultural superiority

in order to justify the degeneration in their own moral values." 11 In a Caribbean context,

this argument holds that the enslavement and imperial conquest brought by Europeans to

the Caribbean was not in origin motivated by racism, but in order to justify the act, the

humanity of the adversary was negated, and only later were theories of racial superiority

clearly articulated to explain and justify what had occurred.

It is necessary to examine the process of colonization and enslavement in the

Caribbean in these terms. Although Eric Williams' economic reductionist argument has
9
for instance Las Casas, Batolomé De. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Middlesex:
Penguin Books, 1552 (1992).
10
Case, 1977. (p. 7)
11
Case, 1977. (p. 10)

4
been shown to have greatly oversimplified the forces that led to the enslavement of

Africans, it is true that the economic considerations were what motivated European

aristocrats to find forced labour in the first place. In Capitalism and Slavery, Williams

examines the types of forced labour used by the European elite in the Caribbean.

Indigenous Peoples, Africans and Europeans were all used as forced labourers of one

form or another in the sixteenth century Caribbean. Although the poor Europeans who

were brought to the Caribbean, like Indians several centuries later, were officially

"indentured" and thus technically free after a certain period of service, Williams argues

that they were treated with the same barbaric harshness as their African and Indigenous

counterparts in the sixteenth century.12 Williams concludes: "Slavery in the Caribbean

has been too narrowly identified with the Negro. A racial twist has thus been given to

what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism: rather,

racism was the consequence of slavery."13

Williams' argument, however, does not critically examine the social and cultural

forces that defined the limits of exploitation for European aristocrats. Europeans were

never officially considered "slaves" in the Caribbean, as Africans were from the

beginning. Europeans who were indentured in the Caribbean were also officially

considered to have committed an offence that merited their indentureship. Although this

was often not the case, all Indigenous Peoples were subject to the encomienda system

under Spanish rule because they were Indigenous, and for no other reason. Although

Africans were enslaved in various parts of Africa as criminals or captives of war, the

Europeans who purchased them were never concerned with this. In fact, they often

12
Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944 (1994).
(p. 10-14)
13
Williams, 1944 (p. 7)

5
intentionally caused conflicts in West Africa and even sent out raiders to kidnap people

into slavery.14 This racial policy was justified as the spreading of Christianity, but in

practice it was a system of enslavement based on 'race' with little to no attempt at

conversion except at Christian missions.15

Most importantly, the entire process of European imperialist expansion in the

Americas reveals an assumption on the part of both the explorers and the governments

they represented that they had a 'right' to the land and labour of the peoples whom they

met. This assumption was a supremely arrogant philosophy that had emerged from the

tradition of the Crusades and the reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula. The reconquista

was primarily a war for territory, and according to Mark Meyerson, the rhetoric of 'holy

conquest' was largely brought by northern Europeans who had fought in the Crusades and

came to aid the Christians in Spain. Many Iberians, both Christian and Muslim, fought as

mercenaries on both sides of this conflict.16 However, whether justified by 'holy

conquest', racial superiority, or just selfish expansionism, the concept of a Christian

European 'right' over the rest of the non-Christian world guided both the reconquista and

the conquest of the Americas.

While European concepts of 'right to rule' and the history of expansionism and

frontierism in Spain made the conquest of the Americas possible, the process of enslaving

Africans was also made possible by certain European social and cultural norms.

Indigenous Peoples were the victims of the first attempt by Europeans to enslave others

for work in the Americas. As the genocidal policy of forced labour and the spread of

deadly diseases decimated the Indigenous Peoples of the Caribbean, "humanitarians"

6
such as Las Casas looked for alternative forced labour supplies. Las Casas was horrified

at the loss of so many people whom he viewed as "particularly receptive to learning and

understanding the truths of our Catholic faith."17 Thus, the enslavement of Europeans

would do little to 'improve' the world through Christianity, because Europeans

themselves were already Christians. So, as C.L.R. James wrote, "Las Casas… hit on the

expedient of importing the more robust Negroes from a populous Africa."18

Winthrop Jordan argues that Europeans began to associate Africans with

enslavement and Europeans with freedom as they attempted to define themselves as

"Christian, civilized, free men."19 In order to overcome this crisis in identity brought

about by their "discovery" of peoples so unlike themselves, argues Jordan, they found it

necessary to equate Africans with savagery, heathenism, blackness and slavery and

themselves with civilization, Christianity, whiteness and freedom. In portraying this

transformation as an almost purely socio-cultural process, he takes the opposite view of

Eric Williams who argues that it was completely due to the economics of forced labour in

the rise of the capitalism. Chinua Achebe also holds an interpretation closer to that of

Williams: "This perception problem ["of alienness that Africa has come to represent for

Europe"] is not in its origin a result of ignorance, as we are sometimes inclined to think.

… It was in general a deliberate invention devised to facilitate two gigantic, historical

events: the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of Africa by Europe."20

The rise in the enslavement of Africans and Indigenous Peoples and the decline in

the indenture of Europeans was made possible by the consolidation of Christian, white,

17
Las Casas, 1552 (1992). (p. 10)
18
James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins. New York: Vintage Books, 1963 (1989). (p. 4)
19
Jordan, 1968. (p. 46)
20
Achebe, Chinua. "Africa's Tarnished Name" in Another Africa. New York: Anchor Books, 1998. (p.
103)

7
civilized, free European identity. However, as the early history of the colonial period in

the Caribbean illustrates, the European elite were in search of a forced labour supply

from their first encounter with the Indigenous Peoples of the region. After the

decimation of the original inhabitants of the islands, both Africans and Europeans were

used as indentured labourers. Orlando Patterson described how initially "there were few

marked differences in the conceptions of black and white servitude, the terms 'slave' and

'servant' being used synonymously. The power of the master over both black and white

servants was near total: both could be whipped and sold." 21 However, as both Williams

and Jordan illustrate, the profitability of the African slave trade coincided with a rise in

the consolidation of distinct new European identities in relation to the rest of the world.

Thus, the economic expedience of African slavery allowed for European indenture to end

as the entire system became justified by theories of racial superiority.

In this way, it was necessary for Europeans to initiate a superiority/inferiority

dialectic of a supposed "White" race over a supposed "Black" race. Alta Jablow and

Dorothy Hammond support this by examining how, at this time, British literature by

travelers to Africa "shifted from almost indifferent matter-of-fact reports of what the

voyagers had seen to judgmental evaluation of the Africans."22 The fact of servitude in

the Caribbean had already existed, but the denigration of Africans in comparison to

Europeans allowed Europeans to justify the system while serving their own economic

interests and creating an identity for themselves of free civilized white Christians.

In order to understand colonization and enslavement in the Caribbean in terms of

'race' and 'racism', it is necessary to examine the various definitions or explanations of

21
Patterson, 1982. (p. 7)
22
Jablow, Alta & Hammond, Dorothy. The Myth of Africa. New York: Library of Social Science, 1977.
(p. 22)

8
these terms. While a dictionary definition of biological race clearly refutes that there is

any such thing as scientific 'races' within humankind, there clearly is a social construct of

race that developed during the colonization of the Caribbean and the enslavement of

Indigenous Peoples and Africans. Frederick Case, drawing on the work of A.G. Bailey,

defines "racial differences" as "those hereditary physical characteristics that remain

constant irrespective of changes in climate, topography, or social and cultural

environment. Racial differences are therefore essentially superficial."23 In a section of

the epilogue to White Over Black entitled "Note On the Concept of Race", Jordan gives a

similar, if more scientific, definition. 24 However, Orlando Patterson has discussed how

these physical differences are highly problematic since phenotypic and genetic

differences within so-called 'races' are often greater than the differences between them.

Thus, the concept of race seems to refer to the socio-cultural identity of phenotypically

arbitrary groups of people. This definition supports the idea that the rise of the concept

of 'races' coincided with the consolidation of European identities that sought to prove the

existence of a superior white Christian race and inferior heathen dark races. Although

Patterson states that "the focus of this 'we-they' distinction was at first religious, later

racial," the concept of 'race' is difficult to distinguish from any such "we-they

distinction." Therefore, the shift did not go from religious to racial, but from "Christian

versus non-Christian" to "White versus Black".

Though Williams, Jordan and Patterson do not directly define "racism", the term

is enormously important. In his discussion of racism, Frederick Case states,

The use of racial difference as a means of obscuring ethno-cultural diversity is the

9
 of those singularities that render them dynamic elements of growth in order to produce a
wildly distorted image based on prejudice. I use the term in its full semantic value
signifying a pre-judgement made before or outside of the experience of a person or
situation.25

This interpretation identifies the concept of 'racism' with "physical appearance", which is

highly problematic given that within groups that are often considered 'races', physical

appearance often varies more than between races. However, in the context of the

emergence of racism, these "racial differences" described by Case refer to the concepts of

"White" and "Black" peoples. This definition, then, does not recognize as racism the

initial European denigration of Africans and Indigenous Peoples for not being Christian.

If Orlando Patterson's statement is correct that initially the "we-they distinction" was

religious and only later became racial, then, according to Case's definition, racism only

emerged after imperialism and enslavement had been enacted in the name of Christianity.

As dangerous as it is to accept such sources, a dictionary definition of "racism"

gives a different picture. Webster's New American Dictionary defines "racism" as "a

belief that some races are by nature superior to others." Their definition of a "race" is "a

family, tribe, people, or nation of the same stock." 26 This interpretation indicates that if

Europeans identified themselves within a Christian "nation", their idea of Christian

superiority was indeed a form of racism. Under such a definition, European ideas of the

inherent superiority of Christians was racism from the beginning. However, according to

Case's interpretation, racism did not emerge until the shift was made from religious to

racial identity, which only occurred with the rise of the enslavement of Africans. Indeed,

in the early sixteenth century, Africans who had converted to Christianity and visited

25
Case, 1977. (p. 46)
26
Webster's New American Dictionary. New York: Smithmark Reference, 1995.

10
Europe were often treated with great respect, while those who did not convert were often

scorned.27

As could be expected, the definitions of terms such as "race" and "racism" are

central to identifying the point at which these concepts emerged. The question that I set

out to examine was whether racist ideology was the catalyst for enslavement and

colonization in the Caribbean, or if it was largely an invention used as an excuse for these

atrocities after they had begun. Given the varying interpretations of "racism", this

question is not easily answered. In order to arrive at a sufficient solution, it will be

necessary to refine an understanding of "racism" and fully examine the process of the

European articulation of superiority over the rest of the world.

27
Hochschild, 1999. (see prologue)

11