Racism

By: Sam Hitchmough

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Racism

Prior to the 1830s, in both the North and the South, the inferiority of black Americans was generally accepted as a given, a tacit assumption that was not strongly challenged. However, the development of immediate abolitionism after 1830 compelled the South in particular to articulate its racism more than it had done before. Rather than presuming white superiority, southerners had to prove it, and they had to defend the political and social status quo that supported the extremely institutionalized racism of slavery.

As abolitionism escalated, racism became unambiguous, based not so much on customs and practices as on the “unquestionable fact” that blacks were in every way inferior. It was not long before southerners used slavery, black inferiority, and racism as mutually reinforcing constructs by claiming that slavery was a natural condition for blacks given their inferiority. In 1833 the publication of Evidence against the Views of the Abolitionists, Consisting of Physical and Moral Proofs of the Natural Inferiority of the Negroes, by a physician and scientist named Richard Colfax, shaped the landscape of racist ideology for generations and was bolstered by the addition of complementary “scientific” evidence later in the century. In 1837 John C. Calhoun of South Carolina famously argued in the U.S. Senate that given the gulf between black and white, slavery was in fact a “positive good.”

The notion of slavery as a “positive good” developed in tandem with the widely held paternalism of many slave owners and defenders of slavery. Among the racist beliefs commonly expressed were that blacks were animalistic, prone to insanity, and filled with uncontrollable lust and cruelty. Slavery not only maintained the correct social relations between black and white but also gave civility to people who would otherwise be savages. This kind of popular racism had certain benefits. Its propagation not only spuriously justified the institution of slavery and strengthened control over the slaves but also provided securities to the white working classes in the South and the North—a sense of superiority and security from wage-labor competition.

As proslavery arguments grew stronger in the 1850s, both on their own steam and in the face of radical abolitionism, it became more and more common for extremely racist doctrines, backed by science as it was understood at the time, to be forwarded. Theories on racial “stocks” and types were popular, and these theories often contended that blacks were either less developed than whites, somehow a degenerative form of whites, or else a different species altogether. Samuel George Morton (1799–1851), a physician from Philadelphia, studied the cranial capacity of skulls and concluded that blacks and whites had in fact been created separately and that whites were innately superior. Numerous other prominent scientists of the time supported the notion, known as polygenesis, that at least some of the human races were created separately and did not share a common ancestor. The idea was not accepted wholesale in the South—after all, it conflicted with the biblical claim that all human beings are descended from Adam and Eve—but it nevertheless became very popular there because it lent itself to racist interpretation.

Popular racism was also rife in northern states, as evidenced in the efforts to restrict black voting and civic participation. Many northern workers did not want blacks competing with them for jobs, and indeed many northerners who opposed the spread of slavery did so not because of moral or ethical arguments but because they feared slavery would undercut their wages. This attitude was shored up by a general surge in American Anglo-Saxon nationalism in midcentury, locked into the notion of Manifest Destiny.

After Reconstruction the genuinely egalitarian impulses of many—perhaps most—northern whites faded as the nation grew wary and weary. Questioning the validity of defending black rights at the cost of perpetuating North-South tension, many whites argued that a speedy reunification was preferable. Northerners watched as the South reimposed strict racism. This abandonment of the Reconstruction experiment in racial equality exposed how ultimately tenuous the northern commitment to it had been. The South was soon able to reassert its racial sentiments, and institutional racism was once more widespread, reversing the gains in racial equality made in the postwar decade. Racism ranged from the extreme physical manifestations of the Ku Klux Klan to the black codes that severely restricted the freedom of blacks.

Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859) and the notion of “survival of the fittest” (a phrase that the great British naturalist did not in fact use in Origin) were interpreted by some as further evidence of the need for racial hierarchies, without which blacks allegedly would simply fade away in a competitive society. Some argued that the race's inevitable degeneracy would pose a threat to cities, towns, and communities and used this claim to support stricter segregation. Racism throughout the century was often the result of perceived, constructed, and exaggerated political, economic, and social concerns, and the racism of the late nineteenth century was a potent mix. Black degeneracy was pivotal to the ideology of extreme racism that engulfed the South after 1890 and condoned the more widespread introduction of segregation and disenfranchisement.

When Frederick Douglass, the former slave who had devoted his long life to championing black freedom and civil rights, died in 1895, racism was becoming even more institutionally prevalent. The following year the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that “separate but equal” facilities for black and white were constitutional, putting a legal face to the racist impulse that had been simmering for decades and that would stretch deep into the twentieth century.

See also Abolitionism; Antislavery Movement; Civil Rights; Discrimination; Ethnology; Evolution; Integration; Laws and Legislation; Proslavery Thought; Race, Theories of; Reconstruction; Segregation; Slavery; Stereotypes of African Americans; Supreme Court; and Voting Rights.

processed xml | source xml