A Disease in the Public Mind Read Online Free PDF

One Muslim writer described them as “the least intelligent and least discerning of mankind.” 2
    This early racism was communicated to white Christians in Spain and Portugal, where there was a Muslim presence for several centuries. Black slaves were numerous in both countries. The Roman Catholic Church found little or no fault with slavery. In 1488, King Ferdinand of Spain gave Pope Innocent VIII a hundred slaves as a gift. The prelate distributed them to various cardinals and Roman nobles. This tolerance was by no means limited to Spain, Portugal, and Italy. The great English humanist Thomas More thought slavery was the proper condition for those convicted of crimes, and he included it in his vision of the perfect republic, Utopia. 3
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    By the early 1600s, in the capital cities of Lima and Mexico City, half the population was enslaved Africans. France also participated in the imperial game, founding colonies in the West Indies and in what is now modern Louisiana that were heavily dependent on enslaved Africans. When Great Britain entered the competition for colonies, her powerful fleet soon won domination of the world’s seas. The British too turned to Africa, where a veritable industry had developed, dedicated to capturing slaves in the interior and selling them on the seacoast. Over the centuries, the price per slave rose over 1,000 percent.
    Between 1501 and the 1880s, when the last two South American states, Brazil and Cuba, abolished slavery, an estimated 12.5 million black men andwomen were purchased in Africa and resold in America . By far the greatest percentage of this staggering number labored to produce the New World’s most profitable product: sugar—a rare luxury in Europe before Columbus. To grow and harvest it required unremitting, exhausting toil in a climate that was thick with diseases such as malaria and yellow fever. 4
    For almost four centuries, Brazil and the West Indies consumed (the word is chosen deliberately) 89 percent of all the slaves shipped to the New World. The Spanish mainland colonies imported only 4.4 percent. About 5.6 percent of this involuntary migration came to Britain’s North American colonies.
    These colonies were soon heavily involved in the slave-based sugar empire. Tons of molasses from the West Indies travelled to New England, where it was used in hundreds of distilleries to make rum. The same ships sold much-needed grain and other farm products to the overpopulated islands. Some colonies, such as Rhode Island and Massachusetts, participated in transporting slaves from Africa. By 1750, there were a half million slaves in the American colonies. Most of these bondsmen were in the South, but some northern colonies had substantial numbers.
    At least 14 percent of New York’s population was slaves; for New Jersey the figure was 12 percent, and for Massachusetts 8 percent. Like the rest of the New World’s settlers, few Americans criticized the institution. “The great majority,” John Jay of New York wrote in 1788, accepted slavery as a matter of course. “Very few . . . even doubted the propriety and rectitude of it.”
    This attitude was reinforced by the knowledge that slavery was hugely profitable. “The Negroe-trade . . . may justly be termed an inexhaustible fund of wealth and naval power to this nation,” wrote one complacent English economist. 5
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    There were a few exceptions to this unanimity. In 1688, four Germantown, Pennsylvania, Quakers sent a vehement protest against slavery to their local Monthly Meeting. They declared that purchasing a slave was no differentfrom buying stolen goods. The local Meeting forwarded it to Philadelphia’s Quaker elders, who had authority of sorts over all the Quakers in America. The Philadelphia elders deposited it in their files and ignored it. Another