Introduction: Recovering the Contexts of Early Modern Proto-Racism

Abstract

The Renaissance became at once a period that marked a turning point in race history and an era whose role in racism has been obscured in the interest of arguments insisting on a divide between early modern and modern ideas of race. Dismissals of considerations of race in the Renaissance, often buttressed by assertions of anachronism, may satisfy desires for finding a race-free “golden age,” but they require an overlooking of evidence. Seeking to challenge such narratives, this discussion begins with a simple fact: the Renaissance oversaw the ushering in of the early modern slave trade in African people during its boom in the Atlantic sugar trade and in the wake of Ottoman conquest cutting off Western Europe’s access to the former white slave trade. Anti-black racism thus appeared as a purposeful rationalization of the “racial slavery” emerging in the Renaissance, well before American chattel slavery. Furthermore, English slave trading is under-documented and the presence of black people in England likewise under-reported. The marked consciousness of race expressed in estranging terms among seventeenth-century British Virginians was preceded by similarly negative entries for black people in Elizabethan parish records back in England. This period was also one in which colonialism first emerged alongside an expansion of linguistic and religiously inflected proto-nationalism. Moreover, what Renaissance Englishmen referred to as the “Stranger” functioned like later racialized fictions of “the Other” in Postcolonial analyses and worked in the promotion of a proto-racism, that is, the earliest observable pre-modern forms of racism preceding and underlying the derivative, so-called modern scientific racism. The latter was not founded upon biologism but, rather, received belief in the supposed rational and moral inferiority of blackness drawn from religious texts, moral allegory, metaphysical philosophy, and the many blackface fool traditions informed by them. Although the word racism first appeared amid scientific rhetoric, conceptually, racism is/was not free from preexisting beliefs. Race-belief remains at the core of racism.