[Marxism] Notes on David Brion Davis' review

[Rakesh Bhandari]

A few notes on the Davis piece.

***Does not emphasize with Frederickson that the curse of Ham fell on 
his son Canaan specifically and not on the son Cush, who according to 
biblical exegesis of the 17 and 18th centuries, was the progenitor of 
the African race.

So yes the increasing enslavement of blacks  transformed biblical 
exegesis!  But if you already believe that God is father and son to 
himself, you can probably be made to believe that the Curse of Ham 
justified the enslavement of dark skinned Africans.

***Davis does not emphasize that with the Curse black slaves are not 
natural slaves (even Aristotle may have thought that slaves were made 
not born and thus not natural in the way moderns came to understand 
it).

With the racialization of the Curse of Ham, Africans are slaves by 
God's will, not as a result of the clockwork mechanisms of nature; by 
divine intervention, not natural heredity. There was at any rate no 
real theory of natural heredity until the nineteenth century, no 
understanding of whether and how like breeds like (people were 
confused by the variations in the relations between offspring and 
parent[s]-see wonderful new book by Matthew Cobb Generation on 
amazon.com website for which I wrote a short review). Even suspicion 
towards conversos in Castilian Spain underlined more the depths of 
religious intolerance than racism as such (see here Frederickson's 
nuanced discussion in his book Racism: A Short History).

Moreover, black slaves are still God's children, not unlike each 
other in terms of biology but in terms of sin.  There is thus a gap 
between Biblical exegesis and the racist ideology of polygenesis, 
sous homme, untermenschen. As a naturalistic ideology, racism, a 
doctrine about  deep natural differences between so called races and 
the inferiority and subhumanity of certain of races over time and 
generations, required a theory of biological heredity. Racism could 
no more be consolidated without a theory of heredity than could 
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. This is why racism 
is not even fully developed during the settler colonialists' seizure 
of Indian lands and the planter's struggle against the abolitionists; 
racism as an ideology of deep natural differences is late born.

Also racism was probably rooted in the metaphors of breeding animals 
and of creating a thorough bred stock, not in the much misunderstood 
Enlightenment science (as both Davis and Frederickson suggest).



***Finding the roots of anti black racism in the Islamic slave trade 
and early medieval Arabic thought is overdrawn, though as we come to 
understand the Eastern origins of Western cultural advances (see John 
Hobson) we should study the Eastern origins of Western forms of 
oppression. If Hobson argues that Western civilization is derivative 
except in its innovation of a racist cultural identity, Davis argues 
that even this was derived from Eastern practice. But I think Davis 
is hasty here. He finds literate expressions of anti black prejudice 
in the medieval Muslim world, but he does not study the different 
nature of its slavery, the dissolving impact of the Koran on such 
anti black prejudice, the often good life chances of manumitted, the 
often free status of children born to slaves, etc. Anti black racism 
was not formed as a doctrine even in the early years of the Atlantic 
slave trade, much less in the medieval Muslim world.

Rakesh Bhandari