Today is Juneteenth, a celebration of the end of slavery in the United States. Well, except for slaves kept by the Five Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole) in what is today the state of Oklahoma. They weren’t freed until the summer of 1866. We should honor Juneteenth and what it means for the Black community, as well as the fact that its promise is still unfulfilled. Black Americans are more likely to die at the hands of the police officers who are supposed to protect them, more likely to be fined into oblivion and more likely to be incarcerated.
I live in Tulsa, which, as I hope you know, has a dark history of racial oppression. Almost 100 years after the Tulsa Race Massacre, we have yet to make reparations, adequately address the events of 1921 and after in our schools, or even find the graves of the dead. The protests in Minneapolis, Louisville, Atlanta, and across the country and globe have engendered hope that things will change. I’ve seen a flurry of memes and quotes espousing the idea that the social progress promised by our forward trajectory in history is finally happening. So, today, I want to address the dangers of the rhetoric of inevitable progress. Full rights, fair treatment and equal opportunity will not be simply granted to African Americans. We must actively seek to bring them into being. Because history shows us that things could get worse.
Here is where starting the study of Black history before American slavery is important. Firstly, the peoples living in Africa had a rich a vibrant history. Secondly (and the focus of today’s blog), the idea of an enslaved black body is a modern one. Slavery was a feature of the ancient Mediterranean: ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans traded in slaves, who could be any conquered or subject peoples. In the ancient world slavery was not tied to skin color, but instead revolved around issues of social status, warfare and profit.
Slavery continued in the medieval era. Norse peoples engaged in slave trading, often taking people into slavery during raids and military conquests. And the Muslim Mamluk Empire based in North Africa was actually ruled by former slaves, many descended from Turkic peoples. Mediterranean people kept slaves of all colors and religions. In fact, they did not perceive race in the same way that we do. They made distinctions based on social status, religion and gender. The mobility of persons across the ancient and medieval Mediterranean meant that people exhibited and recognized a range of skin colors, rather than just two. The situation began to change in the 1440s, when Portuguese sea-faring vessels reached sub-Saharan Africa. Previous European trade with sub-Saharan Africa had been mediated through North African Muslim empires, but Portuguese trading missions opened up the region for exploitation. The presence of slaves from sub-Saharan Africa in mainland Europe exploded.
Yet, attitudes towards persons from Africa were still unfixed. That is, the black body was not necessarily an enslaved body, not necessarily an object on which white bodies could work. Alongside images that depict black slaves were also images of black saints, diplomats and princes.
In Titian’s Portrait of Laura Dianti and a Young Boy (above left), the European mistress of Alfonso d’Este poses with a young boy, probably a slave from Africa. As I discussed in my last blog, she lays her hand on him possessively, and he looks up at her adoringly. This painting set the stage for a long history of visual representation in which white women were paired with young black slaves. The youth of the depicted black persons painted all Africans as child-like and in need of white guidance, while their adoring, even reverent gazes depicted their supposed acceptance of slavery. In contrast, a portrait from some 75 years later (that is, at least 100 years after the beginning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade) depicts a Black African person as a diplomat or ambassador, as indicated by the packet of letters next to his right hand. He is dressed in European clothes, but retains a sash and short sword worn in several regions of North and sub-Saharan Africa.
So, yes, slavery was a feature of European contact with Africa beginning in the ancient world, if not before. And, yes, medieval and Renaissance Europeans did have negative stereotypes concerning black or sub-Saharan Africans, including, for example, the belief that they were well-suited for physical labor and uncivilized. But, European reactions to black Africans had more to do with perceived social status and religion than skin color. Europeans believed that sub-Saharan Africans were uncivilized because their clothing differed so greatly from that of Europeans, and clothing was a primary way that Europeans identified social and religious groups. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Europeans treated Africans who were Catholic or Christian quite differently than those who were Muslim or who practiced animistic religions. For example, the rulers of the Kingdom of Kongo were largely able to protect their citizens from slavery due to their conversion to Catholicism (and the fact that they provided Portuguese slave traders with a steady supply of foreign slaves).
This multi-faceted representation of black Africans began to change in the late seventeenth and eighteen centuries. In 1684 the French physician François Bernier published “Nouvelle Division de la terre, par les différentes Espèces ou Races d’hommes qui l’habitent” (“New Division of the Earth, by the different Species or Breeds of humans who inhabit it”), the first known publication to separate humans based on skin color. By 1784 Thomas Jefferson could write that white skin was preferable to black skin due to the former’s beauty, a fact supposedly acknowledged even by those with black skin. It’s no coincidence that in the intervening century larger numbers of African persons were being enslaved on sugar, tobacco and other plantations throughout the Americas. Ideas of race were mobilized to license slavery, moving from an idea of division based on skin color to hierarchies based on skin color.
While European and American-produced images of free black Africans still existed, images of black persons as slaves were ubiquitous. The superior morality and culture of whiteness, especially the whiteness of Euro-American women, was starkly contrasted with its rhetorical opposite, blackness. In the image to the left the artist John Raphael Smith depicts a white woman holding a mask of a black man or woman with stereotypically large lips. The portrait relates to the popularity of masquerades in late 18th-century Britain, where attendees would wear costumes that crossed boundaries of class, gender and race. Here, the sitter performs whiteness as anti-blackness by proposing to cover her marble white skin and small features with their caricatured opposite.
From the 15th century to the 18th century circumstances became demonstrably worse for black Africans and their descendants. Yes, black slavery existed before 1440, but after the arrival of Portuguese slave traders, the enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans increased exponentially. Through both text and image Europeans and Americans crafted the idea of race as something based on skin color, and they set up hierarchies in which whiteness became superior to blackness. The black body was codified as an inferior object that was to be possessed and shaped by the white body. This is not a history of progress, but one of devolution. Modernity didn’t progress for people of color; it regressed.
So, if, like me, you were raised to believe that things would naturally ‘get better’ as we progressed forward, I hope you will take the lessons of history. Freedom isn’t given; it is taken. Progress doesn’t just happen; we must work for it.
I’m deeply indebted to the work of scholars working on the history of color, race and racism. This is a field that still needs much attention, particularly in the Renaissance and early modern eras. I found the following resources to be helpful: T.F. Earle and Kate J.P. Lowe, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, 2005); Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 2005); Anne Lafont, “How Skin Color Became a Racial Marker: Art Historical Perspectives on Race,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 51 (2017): 89-113; Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal (eds.), Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, 2015); Joaneath Spicer, Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe (Walters Art Museum, 2012).
The Renaissance Uncensored 