Post 4: How “Race” Emerged from Colonialism | Sangwon Yang and Mako Nagasawa
Pictured: The Cathedral of Quito, Ecuador, built by Spanish Catholics from 1562 – 1567. It is the oldest cathedral in South America. Photo credit: Putneymark, Creative Commons 2.0.
The Purpose of A Long Repentance Blog Series
People talk about issues of race and justice in the United States as issues of ‘justice and injustice.’ Sometimes we launch into debates about ‘the proper role of government.’ But is that the original framework from which these issues were asked and debated?
The purpose of the blog post series called A Long Repentance: Exploring Christian Mistakes About Race, Politics, and Justice in the United States is to remind our readers that these issues began as Christian heresies. They were at variance from Christian beliefs prior to colonialism. Since Christians enacted and institutionalized what we believe to be heretical ideas, they were very destructive and harmful, then as now. And we bear a unique responsibility for them. As a result, we believe we must engage in a long repentance. We must continue to resist the very heresies that we put into motion. Thus the title of this blog series, A Long Repentance. The journey is long and challenging. It may be impossible to see the end. But along the way, it is also inspiring and sometimes breathtaking.
We also encourage you to explore this booklet, A Long Repentance: A Study Guide, for further reflections and discussion questions. Here’s a YouTube video called Colonization, Globalization, and Liberating Theologies where co-author Mako Nagasawa did an introduction and summary.
Please read Posts 1, 2, and 3 if you have not already done so.
Colonization and the Grouping of People by Race
We use and welcome a variety of ways to talk about groups of people: by income; by ethnicity; by gender; by biblical groupings like “tribe and tongue”; and by race. We refer to racial groups, especially “black” and “white.” We also refer to racial demographics. Because many people in America prefer to see people as individuals only, and object to grouping people by race, we would like to explain what we mean by these terms, and in what sense we use them.
Racial categories of “white” and “black” have been used in colonial law, U.S. law, and even Supreme Court decisions. They have also been used by Christian theologians, who introduced them into both church practices and civic law in the first place.
Willie James Jennings investigates the impact of Christian colonization in his book, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. Jennings points out that in ancient times, before people started having “family/last names,” their place of origin often signified their identity. We speak of Jesus of Nazareth, Saul of Tarsus, Augustine of Hippo, Leonardo Da Vinci, etc. Scripture also speaks of “families” (Hebrew mishpachah in Genesis 12:3), “ethnicities/nations” (Greek ethnē in Matthew 28:19), and “tribes” (Greek phylēs) and “tongues” (Greek glōssēs in Revelation 5:9). Belonging was social. People had multiple ways of pointing to the groups to which they belonged.
However, Europeans developed other ways of grouping human beings. Most notably in Spain in the Middle Ages, Christians suspected that former Jews or Muslims were not actually Christians, even though they confessed a conversion to Christian faith.[1] Nervous, the Spanish Christians started to focus on blood and skin pigmentation as a new way to group people. European, white bodies became their “norm” for both “Christian identity” and human belonging and identity.
As European colonizers entered Africa and the Americas, they further relied on skin pigmentation. The colonizers began to transform the land, cultivating it and shaping it to their capitalist production. The transformation of the land by colonizers was detrimental not only to the livelihood of the indigenous people, but also the identities of the people which depended on the land.[2] For the indigenous population, their communal identity as a people was lost as they were stripped of their lands, or as their land was stolen. The lens through which the people understood themselves was utterly displaced, and as their identities were being destroyed, a new form of identity was imposed on them.
European colonizers projected their understanding of human identity, one that strictly located within the body of the person. As Jennings notes, this reform of human identity was a task of “flawed theological” re-imagining of not only land and its significance, but of how human beings related to one another. Human identity was no longer conceived in relationship to their land, or in the diversity of ethnicities, tribes, and tongues, but in relationship to white European self-identity and white bodies.[3] And it was in this moment when the previous foundation of human identity was destroyed by colonialism, a new way of understanding human identity began to take hold around the white European, an artificial construct called “race.”[4]
This distorted view of creation, which found traction in Europe in the late 1300’s, abstracted the land as merely an object, a commodity, a resource only valuable for its human utility. This view of creation distorted the significance of land and how it informs human identity even to this day. We – via Adam and Eve – are from the original garden of Eden; we are still meant for God and God’s garden; yet how often do Protestant evangelicals think in terms of our relationship to God alone, not the garden and not the land? And in our contemporary transient world, who would think that the land we live on, the neighborhoods we inhabit are essential for our identity? This view of creation as commodity laid two crucial functions for racialization: human identity separated from the land and a “theological” substance for racial identity.
The distorted view of creation that only valued the land as a commodity or property provided a foundation for racial identity to overtake and eventually determine human identity – i.e., racial identity defines intellectual capacity, social status, musical preference, criminality, choice of career, etc. Human identity abstracted from land may seem normal given our increasingly global and transient world. Land or spatial reality have little to no impact on our identities except as merely the context of a particular memory – i.e., Boston College is where I (Sang) met my wife, I grew up on Richmond Hill Road, etc.
Christian Theologians Construct Racial Identity
Some Christian theologians also connected “race” to “intellect” as a way to group people.[5] Theologians were the first to work with European colonizers and rulers, to justify the racial identity and colonization long before anthropologist or scientists.[6] The Jesuits Alessandro Valignano (1539 – 1606) and José de Acosta (1540 – 1600) placed the “new” people of Africa and Americas into a new “theological” category.
“Black indicates doubt, uncertainty, and opacity of saving effects. Salvation in black bodies is doubtful, as it was in (Christian) Jews and Moors. White indicates high salvific probability, rooted in the signs of movement towards God (for example, cleanliness, intelligence, obedience, social hierarchy, and advancement in civilization). Europeans reconfigured Christian social space around white and black bodies. If existence between Christian and non-Christian, saved and lost, elect and reprobate was a fluid reality that could be grasped only by detecting the spiritual and material marks, then the racial scale aided this complex optical operation.”[7]
Racial identity became married to, and filled with, (false) theological significance to the point that race pre-determined one’s ability to convert to Christianity and the sort of “evangelistic” methods that were necessary for one’s conversion.
For example, Acosta, in his influential work De Procuranda, lays out three types of “barbarians” and appropriate evangelistic methods for their conversion.[8] In the first group are “barbarians” such as the Chinese, Japanese, or East Indians, who showed intellectual capacities through their established system of government, a “complex” written system of language, and intellectual pursuits of “reason.” Acosta recommended not to convert this group of barbarians by the use of force but through arguments of reason. (It is important to note that although this group of “barbarians” were granted the ability to reason, they were not seen as equal to or on par with the white Europeans; they were identified as “barbarians” and thus inferior to the divinely elected Europeans.)
The second group of “barbarians” consisted of Mexicans or Peruvians, who lacked a system of writing or philosophy, but exhibited a system of organized government. This group of “barbarians” could be converted through the guidance and reign of (European) Christian princes.
The last group of “barbarians” were the Africans, who exhibited “animalistic” characteristics of hunting and gathering with no system of organized government or written language. Acosta believed that this last group of “barbarians” could only controlled and forced to convert through Christian dominance.
For Acosta, “race” indicated intellectual capabilities and biological superiority or inferiority. It is important to take a step back and recognize that this is a man who is priest, pastor, and missionary recommending that people of color be converted to Christianity through force and dominance. Acosta’s work was translated into multiple European languages, distributed in Europe as a guide for understanding the Americas for centuries, and later used as a resource for the development of Enlightenment science.[9] Jennings rightly states that Acosta is one of the first (but certainly not the last) to employ theology as an evaluative tool for racial identity.
“…Acosta may be seen as articulating not primarily a new form of theology, but theology in a pedagogical form that constantly reimagines the world and especially native subjects by gauging their intelligence and intellectual capacities…In Acosta, the Augustinian-Anselmic dictum faith seeking understanding mutates into faith judging intelligence.”[10]
Through Acosta’s distorted theological thinking, racial identity is now correlated with faith and human intelligence. Racial identity became a signifier of theological significance: i.e. whites Europeans are able to be “saved” by rational argument, but “black barbarians” need to be forced into faith. Racial identity also became a signifier of intelligence/rationality. This aspect of racial identity continues to be evident in racist stereotypes and caricature that depict various indigenous people as “primitive,” “irrational,” or “unable to perform in higher education.” The colonizers through their partnership with the European Church actively created the new theological foundation for identity and hierarchy: race.[11]
Enlightenment philosophers and scientists inherited this perception. Do an internet search for “Racism in Immanuel Kant” and see what comes up.
European Christians Suppress the Truth
Yet to believe this, Europeans had to suppress facts they already knew. They already knew very positive information about Africans, which contradicted the views of Valignano and Acosta. First, Europeans knew that West Africa was very civilized. The fabulously wealthy Mansa Musa (c.1280 – c.1337), Emperor of the Mali Empire, made a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324. Along the way, he brought so much gold that he caused a massive gold devaluation in Cairo’s gold market. He placed West Africa and the Mali Empire quite literally “on the map” – the map of the 1375 Catalan Atlas, the most important medieval map of Europe and parts of Africa and Asia. How did Europeans reduce the sophisticated West African civilizations to being “animalistic”?
Second, West Africa was already becoming Christianized, so it was a lie to justify enslavement with “evangelism.” An established Christian community lived in the gold-rich kingdom of Mali under Mansa Musa in 1324.[12] Moreover, in 1491, one year before Christopher Columbus set sail for the Americas, King Nzinga a Nkuwu of Kongo, which is today’s northern Angola in West Africa, became a baptized Christian.[13] He did so shortly after his interaction with Portuguese Catholic sailors and merchants. His son Afonso ascended the throne and, with the help of Portuguese Catholic priests and missionaries, organized the Catholic presence in Kongo, from the capital to the remote villages. Afonso’s son Henrique became the first bishop of Kongo. The Kongolese Catholics corresponded with both Portugal and Rome to discuss resources and outreach strategies. Yet within years, the Portuguese started to abduct West Africans into slavery. This means that church history had to be falsified in order for the Catholic Doctrine of Discovery to take effect. Portuguese Catholics enslaved not simply pagans, or Muslims, but their spiritual brethren. Today, about 20 percent of African Americans are descended from the West African kingdom of Kongo, “with the greatest percentages being concentrated in South Carolina and Louisiana.”[14] In fact, the Stono Rebellion in 1739, the largest slave uprising before the American Revolution, was led by Kongolese Catholics.[15] They tried to escape slavery in Protestant South Carolina for freedom in the Spanish Catholic colony of Florida. If African conversions to Christian faith were already happening, then European Christians did not need to control and force it through military power. And if a good portion of West Africans were already Christian, enslavement cannot be justified by “evangelism.”
Third, Portuguese authorities and the Jesuits themselves regarded Christian Ethiopia quite positively. In 1520, Ethiopia’s Emperor Lebna Dengel received military help from Portugal to help resist Muslim forces; a larger Portuguese force arrived in 1541.[16] From 1555 to 1632, Jesuits arrived in Ethiopia and tried to convert Ethiopian Orthodox Christians to Roman Catholicism, starting with the Ethiopian royal court.[17] Some thirty letters in Latin from Jesuits in Ethiopia to either the Pope or their Jesuit superiors are preserved. These letters indicate the high regard with which the Jesuits viewed Ethiopia, in addition to the missionary respect that the Jesuits afforded the Ethiopian Christian civilization.[18] Jesuits in Latin America like Acosta may not have read the reports of other Jesuits in Ethiopia. But the Jesuits as an organization, not to mention the Catholic Church as an organization, surely did. Sadly, José de Acosta and his ideas had more influence over how Christian faith was practiced in the Americas.
Virginia Protestants Make Race the Highest Legal and Theological Factor
Now we turn our focus from the broader world to the U.S., and from Catholics to Protestants. In December of 1662, colonial Virginian English-descended Protestants passed the third of their many slave laws. This particular law declared that the legal status of a child—free or slave—was determined by the legal status of the mother.[19] “Blackness” was already defined as having any amount of African ancestry.
“Because a child took on the status of the mother, mulattoes born to white mothers were free. But these children were treated more harshly than free Black children; those with white mothers were generally required to become indentured servants until they reached thirty years of age. Unlike the racially mixed children of Black women, they represented a corruption of the white race.”[20]
White men were meanwhile free, legally, “to engage in sexual relations with all women.”[21]
In 1667, Virginia Protestants passed a law which said that baptism would not bring freedom to an enslaved person, contrary to longstanding Christian tradition.[22] This law made “property rights for whites” the highest principle, over Christian ethics, ministry, and continuity with longstanding church practice. This law also made “whiteness” a theological, not just a political, category.
In Bacon’s Rebellion (1676 – 77), white indentured servants and enslaved Africans revolted against the governor in Virginia. White elites were disturbed at the alliance between poor whites and blacks.[23] So the white elites drew poor whites into a racial alignment, away from blacks in an economic alignment. In 1682, Virginia passed another slave law which governed marriage in racial and slave-free class terms:
“Whatsoever English, or other white man or woman, being free, [who] shall intermarry with a negro or mulatto man or woman, bond or free, shall, by judgment of the county court, be committed to prison, and there remain, during the space of six months, without bail or mainprize; and shall forfeit and pay ten pounds current money of Virginia, to the use of the parish, as aforesaid.”[24]
The Virginia Slave Law of 1705 went further. It criminalized a Christian minister performing any marriage ceremony between a white person and a non-white person. It also criminalized any black person carrying a gun, striking a white person, or even employing a white person. This meant that “black,” indigenous, and especially “white” became the highest forms of human identity in both church and civic realms. Virginia was the most influential colony, and later, state. The other colonies/states followed suit.
U.S. Law and Whiteness
Another moment in U.S. history illustrates the role of “race.” In 1922, a Supreme Court case was decided against Takao Ozawa, a man who had been born in Japan and spent 20 years living in the U.S. He had graduated from Berkeley High School and the University of California, learned English fluently, became a Christian, and took a job in Hawaii at an American company. Ozawa applied to become a citizen in 1915 under the Naturalization Act of 1906, which said that only “free white persons” and “persons of African nativity or persons of African descent” could become naturalized. Ozawa argued that his skin complexion was “whiter” than many white Americans. The Supreme Court, in a unanimous ruling, decided against him. They said that “the words ‘white person’ was only to indicate a person of what is popularly known as the Caucasian race.”[25]
Within three months, a man named Bhagat Singh Thind also applied for naturalization, was denied, and took his case all the way to the Supreme Court. Thind had come to the U.S. from India for higher studies. He had enlisted in the U.S. Army and rose to the rank of Sergeant in the First World War; he was discharged honorably. Thind was granted citizenship in the state of Washington in 1918, but his status was rescinded because the Fourteenth Amendment expressed the legal supremacy of the United States as a nation over the laws of any given state. Thind argued before the Supreme Court that he was “white,” and indeed “Caucasian,” because “Caucasian” meant “from the Caucasus Mountains.” Anthropologically, his ancestors were descended from “Aryans,” too, but in northern India. He also made a linguistic argument: Hindi was a common linguistic ancestor to both English and the Indo-Aryan languages spoken in northern India. The Supreme Court acknowledged the scientific validity of Thind’s argument but decided unanimously against him. It affirmed Ozawa v. United States (1922), but added that the terms “white” and “Caucasian” were not terms of “scientific origin,” but of “common speech.”[26] In other words, “white” and “Caucasian” meant what the all-white Supreme Court decided it meant.
As a result of United States vs. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), Irish, Italian, Polish, and other European ethnic groups were considered “white,” where they had not been before.[27] Meanwhile, another Indian-American, A.K. Mozundar, who had become naturalized in 1913, had his citizenship revoked. Other Indian-Americans retroactively lost their citizenship and with it, their land or their leases. They fell under the jurisdiction of the California Alien Land Law Act of 1913. The 1946 Luce-Cellar Act concerning immigration quotas effectively undid this ban on naturalization. However, “white” and “Caucasian” remain part of these 1922 and 1923 Supreme Court decisions and are the highest law of the land on record. Although these decisions are effectively ignored today, they attest to the legal construction of whiteness and its arbitrariness.
Conclusion: Why Talk About Race as One Category Among Others
“Whiteness” has never been just an informal way to group people, in other words. “Whiteness” has a long history in U.S. law and policy. It has been the permit to own land, the broadest source of wealth, and to belong in the United States. As such, “race” is not something we can ignore, even though people today might wish to say, “I don’t see color, and neither should you.” The reality is that Western Christians made “whiteness” and “blackness” part of both church and society, sharply affecting their sense of belonging and their property rights and levels of wealth. And we need to examine its impact on people considered at various times, “white,” and people considered “black.”
In large part, Europeans invented race as a category to reject longstanding Christian practices. “Race” was used to discard sensitive evangelism that honored people’s cultures and rationality. “Race” was used to disregard people’s marital and parental rights as being from God. “Race” was used to make slavery easier, and to set aside the longstanding Christian tradition of abolishing chattel slavery to whatever degree possible. “Race” was used to set aside the longstanding Christian tradition of setting an enslaved person free at baptism.
Additionally, from the time of colonial America, “whiteness” in the United States was an effort to form political alliances so that poorer people would not pursue together their shared economic interests like abolition, higher wages, worker safety, soil health, economic freedom, and honoring peace treaties. Dividing people by “race” into “white” and “black” and “indigenous” benefited the plantation capitalists: divide the labor force so that poor whites would have to work for lower wages because they had to compete with slave labor; arm at least certain white people with guns to defend against slaves, Natives, and labor uprisings. Keri Leigh Merritt’s book Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South does an excellent job explaining the economics and politics of racial plantation capitalism.[28] This became a pattern in U.S. politics. “Whiteness” itself was a political tool to isolate people who were designated “black.”
Because race was inserted by Protestant Christians into church and society, “race” must be regarded as a Western Christian heretical construct, not just an ordinary social construct. It is a heretical category of belonging. It continues to do the “work” it was intended to do.
[1] Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), p.79; and Barry Harvey, Taking Hold of the Real: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Profound Worldliness of Christianity (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015), p.188. See also J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
[2] Jennings, p.43 writes:
“Everything – from peoples and their bodies to plants and animals, from the ground and the sky – was subject to change, subject for change, subjected to change. The significance of this transformation cannot be overstated. The earth itself was barred from being a constant signifier of identity. Europeans defined Africans and all others apart from the earth even as they separated them from their lands.”
[3] Jennings, p.58 writes:
“Europeans enacted racial agency as a theological articulated way of understanding their bodies in relation to new spaces and new peoples and to their new power over those spaces and peoples. Before this agency would yield the “idea of race,” “the scientific concept of race,” the “social principle of race,” or even a fully formed “racial optic” on the world, it was a theological form – an inverted, distorted vision of creation that reduced theological anthropology to commodified bodies. In this inversion, whiteness replaced the earth as the signifier of identities.”
[4] Jennings, p.58 writes:
“When you disrupt and destroy the delicate and contingent connections of people’s’ identities bound to specific lands you leave no alternative but racial identity.”
[5] An example of this change in the Enlightenment philosopher Rene Descartes’ famous phrase, “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes’ statement highlights that it is the “mind” or human thought that defines human existence and identity. Following Descartes’ example, European philosophers began to abstract and isolate human identity to the “intellect,” social status, or ecclesial status – simply located in the individual. It is no accident that we call ourselves homo sapiens, sapiens meaning “wise.” A meaningful Christian reminder would be to say we are homo adorans, adorans meaning “worshipful,” or homo divinus, divinus meaning “divine” as in called to become one with God.
[6] Harvey, p.188.
[7] Jennings, p.35.
[8] José de Acosta, De Procuranda Indorum Saltue: Pacificacion y Colonization, ed. L. Pereñ et al., 2 vols, 1:60 cited by Jennings, p.103.
[9] Jennings, p.85.
[10] Jennings, p.108; emphasis added
[11] Jennings, p.29 says,
“Church and realm…stand between peoples and lands and determine a new relationship between them, dislodging particular identities from particular places. Through a soteriological vision, church and realm discern all peoples to exist on the horizon of theological identities.”
[12] A fascinating record is found in Nehemia Levtzion and J.F.P. Hopkins, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, May 2011), p.250. Mansa Musa was asked, “How is the description of the place where gold grows with you?” He replied:
“It is not in that part of our land which belongs to the Muslims, but in the land which belongs to the Christians of the Takrur. We dispatch collectors to take from them a species of tribute due to us and obligatory upon them. These are special lands which put forth gold in this fashion: it consists of small pieces of varying sizes, some like little rings, some like carob seeds, and the like.”
The qadi Fakhr al-Din continued. “I said, Why don’t you take this land by conquest?”
He replied: “If we conquer them and take it, it does not put forth anything. We have done this in many ways but seen nothing there; but when it returns to them it puts forth as usual. This is a most amazing thing and is perhaps due to an increase of the oppressiveness of the Christians.”
[13] See the very readable summary by John K. Thornton and Linda M. Heywood, “A Forgotten Catholic Kingdom,” The Root, August 12, 2011; https://www.theroot.com/a-forgotten-african-catholic-kingdom-1790865260. Thornton and Heywood tell the remarkable story of how King Afonso of Kongo became a baptized Catholic in 1491, and fully welcomed Portuguese Catholic priests and missionaries. The full account can be found in Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). See also John Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750,” The Journal of African History, Jan 1, 2009; https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-african-history/article/abs/div-classtitlethe-development-of-an-african-catholic-church-in-the-kingdom-of-kongo-14911750a-hreffn01-ref-typefnspan-classsup1spanadiv/2FB5AD22282AF36704DE49E593623693.
[14] John K. Thornton and Linda M. Heywood, “A Forgotten Catholic Kingdom,” The Root, August 12, 2011; https://www.theroot.com/a-forgotten-african-catholic-kingdom-1790865260.
[15] Lisa Vox, “What Impact Did the Stono Rebellion Have on the Lives of Slaves?” Thoughtco, Jan 13, 2018; https://www.thoughtco.com/what-really-happened-at-stono-rebellion-45410 writes:
“South Carolinians thought it was possible that the enslaved peoples' African origins had contributed to the rebellion. Part of the 1740 Negro Act, passed in response to the rebellion, was a prohibition on importing enslaved Africans. South Carolina also wanted to slow the rate of importation; Black people outnumbered White people in South Carolina, and South Carolinians feared insurrection.
“The Negro Act also made it mandatory for militias to regularly patrol to prevent enslaved people from gathering the way they had in anticipation of the Stono Rebellion. Enslavers who treated their captives too harshly were subject to fines under the Negro Act in an implicit nod to the idea that harsh treatment might contribute to rebellion.”
[16] For a readable history, see Epic World History, “Lebna Dengel – Ethiopian Ruler.” https://epicworldhistory.blogspot.com/2012/06/lebna-dengel-ethiopian-ruler.html. See also Reidulf K. Molvaer, “The Tragedy of Emperor Libne-Dingil of Ethiopia (1508-1540)”, Northeast African Studies, Vol.5, No.2, p.23 – 46; https://muse.jhu.edu/article/399122.
[17] Leonardo Cohen, The Missionary Strategies of the Jesuits in Ethiopia (1555-1632) (Google Books, 2009); https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Missionary_Strategies_of_the_Jesuits/4Zs3CcC2eLoC?hl=en. On the leading Jesuit Pero Paez, who focused on the Ethiopian court from 1603 – 1622, see Calvin E. Shenk, “Reverse Contextualization: Jesuit Encounter with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church,” Direction: A Mennonite Brethren Forum, Spring 1999, Vol.28, No.1, p.88 – 100; https://directionjournal.org/28/1/reverse-contextualization-jesuit.html.
[18] See Jessica Wright and Leon Grek, translators; Wendy Laura Belcher, editor, The Jesuits in Ethiopia (1609-1641): Latin Letters in Translation; https://wendybelcher.com/african-literature/latin-letters-of-jesuits/ write:
“After fifty years of failure, the Portuguese sent a new group of Jesuits to Ethiopia in 1603, including a priest named Pedro Paez, whose diplomacy and sympathy for many of the tenets of the Ethiopian Orthodox Täwahədo Church enabled him to convert the emperor. When Paez died, his successor, Alfonso Mendes, was more aggressive about eradicating Ethiopian religious practices and a civil war broke out. In 1632, the emperor abandoned the effort to convert the country by force, rescinded his conversion, and abdicated to his son in 1632. This son eradicated Roman Catholicism.
“The Jesuits—including Manoel de Almeida, Manoel Barradas, Jerónimo Lobo, Alfonso Mendes, and Pedro Paez—wrote half a dozen histories about their encounter with the Ethiopians in the first half of the century. They also wrote letters and official reports that have been preserved. Perhaps because of the mission’s failure, none of the Jesuits’ accounts were published in full until the twentieth century. Parts of the work by Barradas, Lobo, and Paez have been translated into English, but nothing by Mendes, the patriarch and most influential figure, has been translated into any language. This is so largely because Mendes’s history, letters, and reports are in Latin.”
[19] Virginia Slave Act of December 1662:
“Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a Negro woman should be slave or free, be it therefore enacted and declared by this present Grand Assembly, that all children born in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother; and that if any Christian shall commit fornication with a Negro man or woman, he or she so offending shall pay double the fines imposed by the former act.”
[20] Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1997), p.268.
[21] Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York, NY: Nation Books, 2016), p.41.
[22] This tradition of connecting baptism with freedom from enslavement stretches very far back. Murray Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World (New York, NY: New Amsterdam Books, 1989), p.29 points out that during the time of the First Crusade (1097 AD) and the subsequent establishment of the “Crusader Kingdoms” in Jerusalem and Antioch for two hundred years, any Muslim slaves who converted and received baptism would have been freed according to long established Christian convention, the crusader lords “defied papal edicts” and “hampered mendicant efforts at converting enslaved Muslims.”
See also Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2005), p.28:
“Slavery ended in medieval Europe only because the church extended its sacraments to all slaves and then managed to impose a ban on the enslavement of Christians (and of Jews). Within the context of medieval Europe, that prohibition was effectively a rule of universal abolition [from chattel slavery].”
For discussion about the time of European colonialism, see Katharine Gerbner, “Conversion and Race in Colonial Slavery,” The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere, June 26, 2018; https://tif.ssrc.org/2018/06/26/conversion-and-race-in-colonial-slavery/ as an introduction to her book and research.
“White slave owners used religious difference to justify enslavement and they policed the line between slave and free by restricting access to baptism. In places like Barbados, South Carolina, and St. Thomas, the vast majority of Protestant slave owners denied enslaved people access to Protestant baptism.
“Protestant Supremacy was a cornerstone of the first slave laws in the English colonies. In Barbados, where the first English Slave Code was drawn up in 1660, Christian status was used to distinguish slaves from servants (many of whom were Catholic) and free people (most of whom were Protestant). In this context, before the codification of racial slavery, slave owners viewed conversion as a step toward slave rebellion. This practice was in striking contrast to most Catholic slave societies, where baptism was a tool of colonial governance, and enslaved people were, at least in theory, all baptized Catholics.”
[23] William J. Cooper, Liberty and Slavery: Southern Politics to 1860 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2001, p.9.
[24] Virginia Slave Law of 1682, Article XIX.
[25] “Ozawa v. United States,” Densho Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Ozawa_v._United_States/.
[26] United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, Certificate From The Circuit Court Of Appeals For The Ninth Circuit., No. 202. Argued January 11, 12, 1923.—Decided February 19, 1923, United States Reports, v. 261, The Supreme Court, October Term, 1922, 204–215.
[27] Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995). David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2018)
[28] Keri Leigh Merritt, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).