At the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, most Europeans would have thought of Africans, if they thought of them at all, as savages in their social customs, religious practices, language, and methods of war. They grouped Africans into the despised categories of pagan heathens and Muslim infidels.

459

As Europeans turned to Africa for new sources of slaves, they drew on beliefs about Africans’ supposed primitiveness and barbarity to defend slavery and even argue, like Sepúlveda with regard to indigenous Americans, that enslavement benefited Africans by bringing them the light of Christianity. In 1444 an observer defended the enslavement of the first Africans by Portuguese explorers as necessary for their salvation “because they lived like beasts, without any of the customs of rational creatures, since they did not even know what were bread and wine, nor garments of cloth, nor life in the shelter of a house; and worse still was their ignorance, which deprived them of knowledge of good, and permitted them only a life of brutish idleness.”22

Over time, the institution of slavery fostered unprecedented ideas about racial inequality. Africans gradually became seen as utterly distinct from and wholly inferior to Europeans. From rather vague assumptions about Africans’ non-Christian religious beliefs and general lack of civilization, Europeans developed increasingly rigid ideas of racial superiority and inferiority to safeguard the growing profits gained from plantation slavery. Black skin became equated with slavery itself as Europeans at home and in the colonies convinced themselves that blacks were destined by God to serve them as slaves in perpetuity.

Support for this belief went back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s argument that some people are naturally destined for slavery and to biblical associations between darkness and sin. A more explicit justification was found in the story of Noah’s curse upon the descendants of his disobedient son Ham to be the “servant[s] of servants.” Biblical genealogies listing Ham’s sons as those who peopled North Africa and Cush (which includes parts of modern Egypt and Sudan) were read to mean that all inhabitants of those regions bore Noah’s curse. From the sixteenth century onward, many defenders of slavery cited this story as justification for their actions.

After 1700 the emergence of new methods of observing and describing nature led to the use of science to define race. Although the term originally referred to a nation or an ethnic group, henceforth “race” would be used to describe supposedly biologically distinct groups of people, whose physical differences produced differences in culture, character, and intelligence. Biblical justifications for inequality thereby gave way to supposedly scientific ones (see “Enlightenment Debates About Race”).