Through what processes were
ideas of racial difference
developed in Africa and
America?
Introduction – What is race?
 Race as a cultural construct. “ Race as a mechanism
of social stratification and as a form of human
identity is a recent concept in human history”
 First used in the 16th century in the English language
to describe humans as part of England’s contact with
wider world.
 Race only came to be used in its modern sense in the
American colonies in 18th century, as “a form of
social identification and stratification grounded in
differences in physical appearance but whose real
meaning lay more in social and political realities.”
Development of racial difference in
America and Africa
1) The Transatlantic Slave Trade - undeniably racist
institution.
“The trade partly Africanized portions of the New
World; it permitted the rise of tropical plantation
economies and brought about a transatlantic variety of
hereditary serfdoms in which bonds-men came to be
distinguished by the color of their skin.”
Dunnigan and Gann, The United States and Africa: A
History
Slavery
 A) Ideas of racial difference led to slavery.
Enlightenment ideas of human progress and
civilisation, overseas imperialism and AngloSaxonism developed attitude of racial superiority
amongst English
 B) Slavery and racial difference as a solution to
economic, social and political need
Slavery
 Slavery “was the practical facet of a general debasement
without which slavery could have no rationality. (Prejudice
too, was a form of debasement, a slavery of the mind.)
Urgent need for labour moulded debasement and put it into
institutional framework. That economic practicalities
shaped the external form of debasement should not tempt
one to forget, however, that slavery was at bottom a social
arrangement, a way of society's ordering its members in its
own mind.”
 Winthrop D. Jourdan, in Major Problems in African and
American History
Slavery
 “It was slavery that made Virginians dare to speak
a political language that magnified the rights of
freemen….The very institution that was to divide
North and South after the Revolution may have
made possible their union in a republican
government.”
 Edmund S. Morgan, Major Problems in African-
American History
Development of racial difference in
America and Africa
2) Debates over African Identity and the establishment of
colonies in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 18th and 19th
centuries.
 African descended authors who alluded to heritage of slave
trade, creating unity of those affected, and a new identity
based on shared racial origins.
 Differed themselves from Africans on the continent.
Wanted to christianize and “civilise”.
 Emigrationist thought led to development of AfricanAmerican colonies of Sierra Leone and Liberia. New
diasporic identity – not African and not wholly American.
 Discourse disintegrates as realisations that the ACS
(American Colonization Society) served slaveholders
interests only. “Colored” replaced “African”
Olaudah Equiano –
convinced abolitionist. His
autobiography, The
Interesting Narrative of the
Life of Olaudah Equiano,
depicts the horrors of
slavery and influenced the
enactment of the Slave
Trade Act of 1807
HOWEVER….
 Although ideas of racial difference did develop via
these processes, other identities were forming at the
same time that are just as important to understand
the history of the relations between Africa and
America.
 Gilroy – “Many black intellectuals born out of the
slave trade travelled and worked in a transnational
frame that precludes anything but a superficial
association with their country of origin”
Conclusion
 By beginning of 20th century, racial difference
solidly established in North America and
unsatisfying situation in regards to the conditions of
African Americans.
 The further development of Pan-Africanist thought
in the 19th and 20th centuries, WW2 and eventually
the Civil Rights movement would provide platforms
to explore and find flaws in these ideas of racial
difference and as Gilroy argues, “articulate a desire
to escape the restrictive bonds of ethnicity, national
identification and sometimes even “race” itself.”
Bibliography
 Duignan, Peter and Lewis Gann. The United States and Africa:
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A History, 1994
Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness, 1993
Holt, Thomas and Barkley Brown, Elsa, ed., Major Problems in
African-American History, 2000
Jalloh, Alusine and Toyin Falola, eds., The United States and
West Africa: Interactions and Relations, 2008
Sidbury, James, Becoming African in America: Race and
Nation in the Early Black Atlantic, 2007
Smedley, Audrey, "Race" and the Construction of Human
Identity,, American Anthropologist , New Series, Vol. 100, No.
3, 1998