Saturday, November 14, 2009

The nature of racism

How the science was used as a tool of discrimination and racism in the XIXth Century. Here are some quotations from British-American books and journals that I found in Piers Berndon’s book about the „Decline and fall of the British Empire”:

John Hunt - On the Negro's Place in Nature (published in: 1863)
"Apart from a crude knowledge of metallurgy, Africans possessed 'no art'."


J. C. Nott - The Negro Race - Popular Magazin of Antropology, III. (July, 1866)

"The black man must be a servitor if not actually a slave - slavery is the normal condition of the Negro, the most advantageous to him."


Winwood Reade - Savage Africa - (1864) about an idyllic white future for the dark Africa:

"When the cockneys o Timbuctoo have their tea-gardens in the Oases of the Sahara; when hotels and guide-books are established at the Sources of the Nile, when it becomes fashionable to go yachting on the Lakes of the Great Plateau; when noblemen, building seats in Central Africa, will have their elephant-parks and their hippopotami waters; young ladies on camp-stools under palm trees will read with tears The Last of the Negroes; and the Niger will become as romantic as the Rhine.”


In contrary:

Cicero's advise to Atticus in the Ancient Rome after Julius Ceasar was landing in Britain:

"Do not buy slaves from Britain because these scantily clothed barbarians were the ugliest and most stupid creatures, quite incapable of learning music and other accomplishments."

Everybody is able to change and to achieve improvements as soon as you give a space for that.


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