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RED, WHITE, AND BLACK
The Origins of Racism in Colonial America

By Gary B. Nash

Racial attitudes in America have their origins in the culture of
Eliza-bethan England, for it was in the closing decades of the sixteenth
century that the English people, who were on the verge of creating an
overseas em-pire in North America and the Caribbean, began to come into
frequent contact with peoples whose culture, religion, and color was
markedly dif-ferent from their own. In the early responses of Englishmen to
Indians and Africans lay the seeds of what would become, four centuries
later, one of the most agonizing social problems in American history--the
problem of racial prejudice.

Englishmen did not arrive at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, or at Ply-mouth,
Massachusetts, in 1620, with minds barren of images and precon-ceptions of
the native occupiers of the land. A mass of reports and stories concerning
the Indians of the New World, many of them based upon the Spanish and
Portuguese experience in Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, were avail-able in
printed form or by word of mouth for curious Englishmen crossing the
Atlantic. From this literature ideas and fantasies concerning the Indians
gradually entered the English consciousness.

These early accounts seem to have created a split image of the Indian in
the English mind. On the one hand, the native was imagined to be a savage,
hostile, beast-like creature who inhabited the animal kingdom rather than
the kingdom of men. In 1585, prospective adventurers to the New World could
read one description of the natives of North America which depicted them as
naked, lascivious individuals who cohabited "like beasts without any
reasonableness." Another account described them as men who "spake such
speech that no men could understand them, and in their demeanor like to
brute beastes."1 But Englishmen also entertained another more positive
version of the New World native. Richard Hakluyt, the great propagandist
for English colonization, described the Indians in 1585 as "simple and rude
in manners, and destitute of the knowledge of God or any good laws, yet of
nature gentle and tractable, and most apt to receive the Christian
Religion, and to subject themselves to some good government."2 Many other
reports spoke of the native in similarly optimistic terms.

This dual vision of the native matched the two-sided image of the New World
refracted through the prism of the sixteenth-century European mind. In some
ways prospective colonists fantasized the New World as a Garden of Eden, a
land abounding with precious minerals, health foods, and exotic wildlife.
The anti-image was of a barbarous land filled with a multitude of unknown
dangers' a "howling wilderness" capable of dragging man down to the level
of beasts.

In a rough way the two images of the Indian not only matched English
visions of the New World, but coincided with the intentions of prospective
settlers. In the early stages of colonization, when trade with the Indians
was deemed important and the hope existed that the natives would lead the
settlers to gold and silver--perhaps even to the fabled Northwest Pas-sage
to the Orient--the Indians were seen as primitive but winsome, as ignorant
but receptive individuals. If treated kindly, they could be wooed and won
to the advantages of trade and cooperation with the English. Only a
friendly or malleable Indian could be a trading or assisting Indian. Thus,
when thoughts of conducting trade and exploration from small trading
stations on the coast were uppermost in the English mind, as they were
be-tween 1580 and 1610, the colonial leaders frequently portrayed the
Indian in relatively gentle hues. Though the natives could be wary and
"fearful by nature," wrote George Peckham in 1585, "courtesie and myldnes"
along with a generous supply of "prittie merchaundizes and trifles" would
win them over and "induce theyr Barbarous natures to a likeing and mutuaU
society with us."3 A1so important in this optimistic view of the native was
the need to quiet the fears of prospective colonists by assuring them that
the indians were not waiting to destroy them or drive them back into the
sea.

When permanent settlement became the primary English concern, however, and
land the object of desire, the image of the Indian as a hostile savage
became ascendant in the English mind. Beginning with the Jamestown
settlement of 1607 and intensifying with the great Puritan migration of the
1630's, Englishmen coming to the New World thought less about Indian trade,
the Northwest Passage, and fabled gold mines and more about land. As the
dreams of E1 Dorado evaporated, English attention centered on the less
glamorous goal of permanent settlement. Now land became all-important, for
without land how could there be permanent settlement? The Indian, who had
been important when trade and exploration were the keys to overseas
involvement, became an inconvenient obstacle. One Englishman went to the
heart of the difficulty in 1609: "by what right or war-rant can we enter
into the land of these Savages, take away their right-full inheritance from
them, and plant ourselves in their places, being unwronged or unprovoked by
them?4 It was a cogent question to ask, for Englishmen, like other
Europeans, had organized their society around the concept of private
ownership of land. They regarded it, in fact, as an important
characteristic of their superior culture. Colonists were not blind to the
fact that they were invading the land of another people, who by prior
possession could lay sole claim to the whole of mainland America. The
resolution of this moral and legal problem was accomplished by an appeal to
logic and to higher powers. The English claimed that they came to share,
not appropriate, the trackless wilderness. The Indians would benefit
because they would be elevated far above their present condition through
contact with a richer culture, a more advanced civilization, and most
importantly, the Christian religion. Samuel Purchas, a clerical promoter of
English expansion, gave classic expression to this idea: "God in wisedome
... enriched the Savage Countries, that those riches might be attractive
for Christian suters, which there may sowe spirituals and reape temporals."
Spirituals, to be sown, of course, meant Christianity; temporals to be
reaped meant land. Purchas went on to argue that to leave undeveloped a
sparsely settled land populated only by a few natives was to oppose the
wishes of God who would not have showed Englishmen the way to the New World
if he had not intended them to possess it.5 Moreover, if the English did
not occupy North America, Spain would; and the Indians would then fall
victim to Catholicism.

Land was the key to English settlement after 1620. It was logical to assume
in these circumstances that the Indian would not willingly give up the
ground that sustained him, even if the English offered to purchase land, as
they did in most cases. For anyone as property conscious as the English,
the idea that people would resist the invasion of their land with all the
force at their disposal came almost as a matter of course. Thus the image
of the hostile, savage Indian began to triumph over that of the receptive,
friendly Indian. Their own intentions had changed from establishing trade
relations to building permanent settlements. A different conception of the
Indian was required in these altered circumstances.

The image of a treacherous, uncooperative Indian caused great confu-sion in
the English mind during the first years of the Virginia settlement when the
Indians still entertained notions of profiting from the English presence.
When Christopher Newport, the leader of the 1607 Jamestown expedition, made
the first exploratory trip up the newly named James River, he was puzzled
by what he encountered. The Indians, he wrote to his superiors in London,
"are naturally given to treachery howbeit we could not find it in our
travel up the river, but rather a most kind and loving people." 6 Every new
act of generosity, there is much evidence that the Indians provided the
food that kept the struggling settlement alive over the first winter, was
taken as another indication of Indian guile and treachery. Hospitality,
eagerness to trade, curiosity at the newcomers, and the desire of some
tribal leaders to use English support to defeat their enemies were all
taken as evidence of the sly, treacherous qualities inherent in Indians.

What we see here is a subconscious attempt to manipulate the world in order
to make it conform to the English definition of it. The evidence also
suggests that the English stereotype of the hostile savage helped assuage a
sense of guilt which inevitably arose when men whose culture was based on
the concept of private property embarked on a program to dispossess another
people of their land. To type-cast the Indian as a brutish savage was to
solve a moral dilemma. If the Indian was truly cordial, generous, and eager
to trade, what justification could there be for taking his land? But if he
was a savage, without religion or culture, perhaps the colonists' actions
were defensible. The English, we might speculate, anticipated hostility and
then read it into the Indian's character because they recognized that they
were embarking upon an invasion of land to which the only natural response
could be violent resistance. Having created the conditions in which the
Indian could only respond violently, the Englishman defined the native as
brutal, beastly, savage, and barbarian and then used that as a
justification for what he was doing.

This concept had a self-fulfilling quality to it. The more violence was
anticipated, the more violence occurred. This is not to argue that
hostility would have been avoided if the settlers had seen the native in a
different light, since opportunities for mutual mistrust and hostility
abounded. But certainly the chances of conflict were greatly enhanced by
misperceiving the intentions of the Indian as he struggled within his own
society to adapt to the presence of the Europeans.

There was hostility. In Virginia, after a period of uneasy relations
punctuated with outbreaks of violence, the Indians mounted a concerted
attack on the white settlements with the intention of driving the white man
back into the sea. The Massacre of 1622 wiped out one third of the
Chesapeake colony. The Indian victory was costly, however, for it left the
English colonists with the excuse to set aside the old claim, frequently
mentioned in the early years of settlement, of devoting themselves to
civilizing and 'converting the natives. After 1622, most Virginians felt at
liberty to attack the natives at will. A no-holds-barred approach was taken
to what became known as the "Indian problem." Whereas before, the settlers
had engaged in reprisals against the natives whenever they had been
attacked, the English now put aside all restraint. As a leader in Virginia
wrote revealingly after the Indian attack of 1622,

Our hands, which before were tied with gentleness and faire usage, are now
set at liberty by the treacherous violence of the Savages so that We may
now by right of Warre and law of Nations invade the Country, and destroy
them who sought to destroy us .... Now their cleared grounds in all their
villages, (which are situate in the fruitfullest places of the land) shall
be inhabited by us, whereas heretofore the grubbing of woods caused us the
greatest labour.7

A note of grim satisfaction that the Indians had conducted an all-out
attack Can be detected. Hereafter one was entitled to devastate Indian
villages and take, rather than buy, the best land of the area. It was a
policy so profitable that the Virginia Council in 1629 reneged on a peace
treaty that had been recently negotiated and proclaimed that on second
thought a policy of "per-petual enmity" toward the natives was best for the
colony.

After 1622 the stereotype of the Indian became less ambivalent, Little in
his culture was found worthy of respect, in fact, he was deemed almost
cultureless. More and more abusive words crept into English descriptions of
Indian society. Negative qualities were newly found and projected onto the
natives. Whereas John Smith and other early leaders of the Virginia colony
had written lengthy descriptions of the political organization, religion,
and customs of the natives, Edward Waterhouse, writing after the Massacre
of 1622, could only describe the Indians as "by nature sloath-full and
idle, vitious, melancholy, slovenly, of bad conditions, lyers, of small
memory, of no constancy or trust…by nature of all people the most lying and
most inconstant in the world, sottish and sodaine, never looking what
dangers may happen afterwards, lesse capable then children of sixe or
seaven years old, and less apt and ingenious ....8 Samuel Purchas, writing
in 1625 of the Virginia Indians, described them as "bad people, having
little of Humanitie but shape, ignorant of Civilitie, of Arts, of Religion;
more brutish then [sic] the beasts they hunt, more wild and unmanly then
[sic] that unmanned wild Countrey which they range rather than inhabite;
captivated also to Satans tyranny in foolish pieties, mad impieties, wicked
idleness, busie and bloudy wickednesse ..... 9 After the Indian attack of
1622 Englishmen in Virginia no longer needed to restrain their impulses or
remind themselves of their obligation to convert the Indian.

In New England, despite the many differences in motives and means of
colonization, attitudes evolved in much the same manner. In the first two
attempts at settlement, on the coast of Maine in 1607 and at Plymouth in
1620, Anglo-Indian relations followed a pattern of initial wariness by, the
Indians, petty acts of violence and plunder by the white settlers, and then
reciprocating and escalating hostility. When the great Puritan migration to
New England began in 1630, the Indians were naturally apprehensive, though
not hostile. John Winthrop, who led the Massachusetts Bay Colony throughout
the 1630s, often mentioned the Puritans' obligation to convert the natives,
giving the impression that he felt a real compulsion to "save their souls
for Christ." But a careful reading of early New England literature suggests
that with significant exceptions such as Roger Williams, the Puritans held
the natives in contempt and would have preferred them all dead or removed
from the region where they were building their "city on the hill." Winthrop
remarked in his journal that the smallpox epidemic of 1617, communicated to
the Indians by visiting fishermen, was God's way of "thinning out" the
native population to make room for the Puritans. Another prominent puritan
referred to the epidemic, which ravaged the New England natives, as a
"wonderful Plague." Later Winthrop wrote that the Indians "are neere all
dead of the small Poxe, so the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we
possess." 10 Rather than civilize or proselytize the natives, it was easier
to see them eliminated by European diseases and then to interpret this as
God's wish.

In the Puritan mind there was always a tension between the inclusionist and
exclusionist impulse, between the evangelical desire to convert the heathen
and others who followed "false Gods," and the desire to keep the community
pure by excluding deviant types. Despite many professions of concern for
converting the natives, New England ministers made only a few perfunctory
efforts in this direction. The same impulse which led to the expulsion of
theologically deviant Puritans such as Anne Hutchinson, and Roger Williams,
or to the persecution of Quakers in Boston in the 1650s, was at the heart
of the unwillingness to assimilate the New England Indians, even on the few
occasions when they were converted to Christianity. Before the end of the
first decade of Puritan settlement, the Indian had come to stand for
Satanic opposition to the divine experiment being conducted in the Bay
Colony. An Indian, when he attacked a white man, indirectly attacked God
whose hand the Puritans saw in all that they did. In this sense, the
Indians came to represent followers of Satan, savages pitting themselves
against the Puritans' "errand into the wilderness." With the drama of
colony building invested with divine guidance, with the hand of God seen in
every act, to kill an Indian who had demonstrated his resistance or
opposition to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was only to destroy an opponent
of God. When hostility with the Pequot Indians flared in 1637, and spread
into a general war, the Puritans again saw evidence of divine intervention.
The climax of the war came when the Puritans surrounded 500 Pequot men,
women, and children in Mystic Fort and burned them to death. The
Massachusetts leaders, suffused with a sense of mission, recorded that God
"had laughed at his Enemies ... making them as a fiery oven…Thus did the
Lord judge among the Heathen, filling the Place [the fort] with dead
bodies."11 To dehumanize the Indians was one means of justifying one's own
inhumanity.

Two important concepts concerning the Indians were left in the English mind
after the first period of painful confrontation. First, the image of the
native as a hostile and inferior creature became indelibly printed upon the
white mind. The Indian was noticeably different in color, though the
colonists seemed to have made little of this. Far more important, be was
uncivilized, and, it was generally concluded, incapable of civilization as
Europeans defined it. As Roy H. Pearce has noted, the Indian was a constant
reminder to the colonists of what they must not become. For men who were
deeply concerned about the barbarizing effects of the wilderness, the
Indian provided a means of measuring their own civility, culture, and
self-identity. "The Indian became important for the English mind, not for
what he was in and of himself, but rather for what he showed civilized men
they were not and must not be."12 Not to control the Indian, therefore, was
to lose control of one's new environment, and ultimately of oneself. This
was the psychological importance of the Indian to the colonist.

At a more practical level was the problem of how to control the Indian.
Defined as a savage, regarded in most cases as unassimilable, and
inconveniently located in the path of English settlement, the Indian posed
one of the colonists' most serious problems. At first colonial leaders had
hoped that cultural interaction with the Indians would be possible. But it
could only be on English terms. When the Indian threatened the white
community, control and security became uppermost in the minds of the
settlers. With the Indian now conforming to type, the colonists worked with
grim determination to isolate this alien and dangerous subgroup and to
control it strictly. A special status, inferior and subservient, was
created for those Indians who wished to accept European culture and live
within it on the white man's terms. The only other alternative for the
native was to move out of the path of English settlement.

During the course of the seventeenth century thousands of Indians did
choose to live within white society. Over the years they became dependent
upon the iron-age implements of the European--the knife, gun, kettle,
fish-hook and, most importantly, upon the white man's liquor. Gradually
those Indians who chose to remain on the eastern seaboard lost their forest
skills. Their culture slowly changed under the pressure of contact with a
more technologically advanced society and their lot often was reduced to
pathetic subservience as day laborers and sometimes as slaves. For these
Indians--tamed, decultured, and utterly dependent--the colonist had only
contempt. 'Unlike his brother on the frontier, the dreaded "savage," the
domesticated Indian was looked upon as a despised menial.

The psychological calculus by which intentions governed attitudes can be
illuminated further by studying the views of Anglo-Americans who genuinely
desired amicable relations with the Indians. The Quakers of Pennsylvania
and West New Jersey, who were the most important early practitioners of
pacifism in the New World, threatened no violence to the Indians when they
arrived in the Delaware River Valley in the last quarter of the seventeenth
century. It was pacifism, not violence, that was on the Quaker mind. Though
relations with the Indians would deteriorate in the eighteenth century,
when Germans and Scotch-Irish streamed into Pennsylvania, it is significant
to note that in the early years of settlement the pacifistic Quakers tended
to view the Indian differently than their neighbors to the north and south.
Though they regarded the native as backward and "under a dark Night in
things relating to Religion," they also saw him as physically attractive,
generous, mild-tempered, and possessed of many admirable traits. William
Penn, the Quaker proprietor of Pennsylvania, revived old speculations that
the Indians were the "Jews of America," the descendants of the Lost Tribes
of Israel, and found their language "lofty" and full of words "of more
sweetness or greatness" than most European tongues. 13

In other colonies, too, the image of the Indian began to change, at least
within the reflective element of society, when the precariousness of the
English position declined and when attacks on white communities subsided.
In the first half of the eighteenth century a number of colonial observers
began to develop a new image of the Indian. Unlike later writers from
seaboard cities or European centers of culture, who sentimentalized the
native into a "noble savage," these men knew of Indian life from first-hand
experience as missionaries, provincial officials, and fur traders. Close to
Indian culture, but not pitted against the native in a fight for land or
survival, they developed clearer perspectives on aboriginal life. During
the earlier period of hostility, the Indian had been regarded as virtually
Cultureless. Now all of the missing elements in the Indian's cultural
make-up government, social structure, religion, family organization, codes
of justice and morality, arts and crafts--were discovered.

Thus, in 1705, thirty years after the last significant Indian attack in
Virginia' Robert Beverley described the Indians in terms strikingly
different from those employed by preceding generations, whose contacts,
even in the best of times, had been highly abrasive. Beverley viewed the
Indians not as savages, but as a cultural group whose institutions, modes
of living, and values were worthy of examination on their own terms. He
found aspects of Indian civilization reminiscent of classical Spartan life
and much to be admired. In Beverley's view, the Indians' contact with
European civilization, far from advancing their existence, was responsible
for the loss of their "Felicity as well as their Innocence." 14

John Lawson, who traveled extensively among the southeastern tribes in the
early eighteenth century, also dwelled on the integrity of native culture
and took note of many traits, such as cleanliness, equable temperament,
bravery, tribal loyalty, hospitality, and concern for the welfare of the
group rather than the individual, that often seemed absent from English
society. Like Beverley, Lawson concluded that the Indians of the southern
regions were the "freest people from Heats and Passions (which possess the
Europeans)." He lamented that contact with the settlers had vitiated what
was best in Indian culture.15 Many other writers who did not covet the
Indians' land or were not engaged in the exploitive Indian trade, agreed
that the concept of community, which colonial leaders cherished as an ideal
but rarely achieved, was best reflected in North America by the natives. As
Pearce has noted, "the essential integrity of savage life, for good and
bad, became increasingly the main concern of eighteenth-century Americans
writing on the Indian."16

It was in an atmosphere emotionally charged by the tension between English
settlers and Indians that the black man made his initial appearance in
America. We know that the first Africans arrived in the colonies in 1619,
though their status-whether slave or indentured servant--is uncertain. Not
until the 1640s do we have any indications that Africans were being
consigned to perpetual servitude and even then the evidence is scanty. But
certainly by the 1660s, the indeterminate position of the African changed;
hereditary slavery took root in the colonies. By the mid-eighteenth
century, the black man in most colonies had been stripped of virtually all
the rights accorded the white settler under the common law. In many
colonies the black man was no longer defined as a legal person, but rather
as chattel property--the object of rights, but never the subject of rights.
A slave could neither appeal to nor testify in the courts; he had no rights
to religion or marriage or parenthood; he could not own or carry arms; he
could not buy or sell commodities or engage in any economic activity; he
could not congregate in public places with more than two or three of his
own race. Even education-the right to literacy--was forbidden slaves in
many colonies, for it was thought that if the African was permitted to
read, the germ of freedom might grow in him.

Much has bee
n written concerning the evolution of this system of chat-tel slavery; and
much has been learned by comparing it to slavery in the ancient world,
where it was not based on race, and in the South American colonies of Spain
and Portugal, where a less repressive and closed system of servitude
developed than in British North America. But for our purposes the primary
question concerns the effect of racial attitudes upon the evolution of
slavery, and, conversely, the effects of slavery, once instituted, upon
racial attitudes. Was racial prejudice against the African responsible for
his consignment to slavery? Or were other factors, such as the great labor
shortage in the New World, combined with the availability of Africans and
the example of slave trading set much earlier by Spain, Holland, and
Portugal, responsible for a system of slave labor which cast the black man
in such an inferior and degraded role that racial prejudice against him
developed?

Certainly there was little about the first impressions of Africans that
Englishmen formed in the late sixteenth century which augured well for the
status of the African in English colonial society. Winthrop D. Jordan shows
in his recent book White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro,
1550-1812, which is the most probing historical account we have of racial
attitudes in early America, that Englishmen responded negatively to
Africans even when their contacts were of a casual and exploratory nature.
To begin with, the African's blackness was strange, troublesome, and
vaguely repugnant. Englishmen were already familiar with people of darker
skin than their own, for they had traded with people of the Mediterranean
world and come into contact with Moors and occasional traders from the
Middle East and North Africa. But they had not met truly black men, though
they had probably heard of them. When these Englishmen, among the
lightest-skinned people in the world, came face to face with one of the
darkest-skinned people of the world, their reaction was strongly negative.
Unhappily, blackness was already a means of conveying some of the most
ingrained values of English society. Black--and its opposite, white--were
emotion-laden words. Black meant foul, dirty, wicked, malignant, and
disgraceful. And of course it signified night--a time of fear and
uncertainty. Black was a symbol signifying baseness, evil, and danger. Thus
expressions filtered into English usage associating black with the worst in
human nature: the black sheep in the family, a black mark against one's
name, a black day, a black look, to blackball or blackmail. White was all
the opposites--chastity, virtue, beauty, and peace. Women were married in
white to symbolize purity and virginity. Day was light just as night was
black. The angels were white; the devil was black. Thus Englishmen were
conditioned to see ugliness and evil in black. In this sense their
encounter with the black people of West Africa was prejudiced by the very
symbols of color which had been woven into English language and culture
over the centuries.

Englishmen also were struck by the religious condition of the African, or
what was considered to be his lack of religion. To the English, the
Africans were heathens--an altogether Godless people. In an age when
religion framed the life of society, this was taken as a grave defect.
Though the universalist strain in their own religion emphasized the
brotherhood of all men, and though the book of Genesis stressed the point
that all men derived from the same act of creation, Englishmen took the
Africans' heathenism as an indication of an almost irreparable inferiority.

Englishmen identified a third characteristic interacting with blackness and
heathenism--what they called cultural depravity or "savagery." Every new
observation of African life added to their belief that the culture of
Africans was vastly inferior to that of Europeans. The African's diet, for
example, was revolting by European standards. He wore few clothes if any.
His habitat was crude. He made war on his fellow men in what was deemed a
hideously cruel way. All of this was imprinted on the English
consciousness, as Jordan points out, and we find words like "brutish,"
"savage," and "beastly" creeping into English accounts of Africans. In
almost all these respects the image of the African coincided with the image
of the Indian after the first period of contact.

Strengthening and vivifying this impression of primitive men in a primitive
setting was the extraordinary animal life of Africa. Englishmen were
fascinated by the numerous subhuman species they encountered and none so
fascinated them as the orangutan or chimpanzee. Though the English were
familiar with monkeys and baboons, they had never encountered the tailless,
anthropoid ape with his curiously human appearance and behavior, which
still makes him a center of attention at zoos. When Englishmen came upon
this strangely human creature they began to speculate about possible
connections, as Jordan has indicated, between the "beastlike man" --the
African--and the "manlike beast"--the orangutan. The logic was tor-tured,
perhaps, but nonetheless Englishmen began discussing the possibility that
the African was an intermediate specie between beast and man. To make
matters worse, there were speculations about sexual unions between man and
beast in Africa, a fantasy of overwrought English imaginations and an idea
that probably suggested itself to Englishmen because promiscuity,
bestiality, and sodomy were not uncommon in England at this time, and in
fact were subjects of some concern. 17

Thus a number of African characteristics--real and alleged--strongly and
negatively impressed English venturers as the New World was opening up: the
African's blackness, his heathenism, his cultural inferiority, his
sexuality, and his bestiality. Because religion and cultural achievement
were the primary reference points for Europeans of this age, it is probable
that in this early period of contact the African's skin color was more a
matter of curiosity than damning concern. Those who have read
sixteenth-century accounts of the Irish, whose ancestral lands were being
invaded by the English in this period, will know that the vocabulary of
abuse used to describe Africans was applied also to Irishmen. They too were
seen as culturally inferior, Savage, brutish, and primitive. The blackness
of Africans was an additional liability, given the connotations of color in
the English mind, but perhaps not a crucially important one. Eventually, of
course, blackness would be firmly linked with other negative qualities in
the English anatomy of prejudice.

It is important to remember that these early observations of Africans, like
those of the Indians, reflect as much about the observer as the observed.
We know now from careful research that Africa was not what Englishmen saw
and recorded in that age of discovery. West Africa lagged behind western
Europe technologically, though the differences were not so great as is
usually imagined, but the area had nurtured a highly developed
civilization. If art, social organization, and cultural traditions are
criteria of advancement, Africa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
was far from primitive and backward. Englishmen saw in Africa not what
existed there, but what they were psychologically prepared to see. They
compared African culture with their own, which they took to be a universal
model.

Further insight into the English reaction to Africans and Indians can be
gained by comparing it to Spanish and Portuguese attitudes. Though
England's colonial competitors regarded the natives of Africa and North
America as primitive and inferior, the image they represented in their
psychic landscape was far less negative and emotional. Geography explains
much of this, for whereas the English of the sixteenth century we noted for
their insularity, the Spanish and Portuguese, situat6d astride Europe and
Africa, had been in near continuous contact with peoples of different races
and cultures for centuries.

Because of this, Portugal, and to a lesser degree Spain, had an ethnic and
cultural diversity not to be found in England. Over the centuries, the
Iberian peninsula had been breached again and again: by Muslims between 711
and 1212, by Jews, Berbers, and North African Moors. As usually happens in
history, the conquerors and the conquered fraternized, inter-married, and
interbred. By the time England was first exposing herself to Africa, her
European competitors, especially Portugal, had already amalgamated their
bloodstreams with people of darker color and different cultures. This
produced a tolerance for diversity in the Spanish and Portuguese cultures
that was absent in the English, who had for centuries been relatively
isolated from the rest of the world.

It would be unwise to conclude that the long warfare between the Portuguese
and Moors and the centuries of contact with a variety of darker-skinned
people eliminated racial prejudice among the Spanish and Portuguese in
Europe or in their New World colonies. Racial consciousness did exist among
these people, and with racial consciousness came feelings of racial
superiority. There can be little doubt that the lighter one's skin, the
greater one's social prestige in Spain and Portugal and in their
colonies--a pattern which still exists. And yet because of their ancient
exposure to and intermixture with people of darker skin, the Spanish and
Portuguese, unlike the English, regarded racial intermixture as inevitable
and attached no great moral significance to it. This difference in attitude
would lead toward a gradual assimilation of races which in turn increased
the tolerance for racial diversity.

A second factor which helps to explain the unusually virulent English
reaction to Air, cans and Indians, not duplicated in Spain and Portugal,
was the internal stresses England was undergoing at the time she first
exposed herself to the outer world. This period of the late Sixteenth and
early seventeenth century, called the age of Puritanism, was a "time of
troubles" for England--an era in which the traditional feudal society was
giving way to a more modern social order. The beginnings of urbanization
and industrialization, the breakup of the traditional church, the enclosure
of land, and the decay of the guilds were all a part of this process.
Englishmen of the late sixteenth century saw poverty and vagabondage on the
rise, dries growing faster than they could absorb rural newcomers into the
traditional close-knit scheme of life, alehouses and dens of prostitution
multiplying, gangs of highwaymen and drifters roaming the country. England
was experiencing not only rural dislocation but an associated "urban
problem."