Race and the Enlightenment

Discussion

Loren Goldner:

"It is not often recognized that, prior to the 17th and 18th centuries, the period which Western history calls the Enlightenment, the concept of race did not exist.

It is still less often recognized that the origin of the concept of race, in the last quarter of the 17th century, in very specific social circumstances, was preceded by centuries of a very different vision of Africans 2 and New World Indians, which had to be eradicated before the concept of race could be invented, expressing a new social practice in new social relations.

In the current climate, in which the Enlightenment is under attack from many specious viewpoints, it is important to make it clear from the outset that the thesis of this article is emphatically not that the Enlightenment was "racist", still less that it has validity only for "white European males". It is rather that the concept of race was not accidentally born simultaneously with the Enlightenment, and that the Enlightenment's "ontology", rooted in the new science of the 17th century, created a vision of human beings in nature which inadvertently provided weapons to a new race-based ideology which would have been impossible without the Enlightenment. Prior to the Enlightenment, Europeans generally divided the known world between Christians, Jews, Moslems and "heathens"3; beginning around the 1670's, they began to speak of race, and color-coded hierarchies of races."

(https://libcom.org/history/race-enlightenment-part-i-anti-semitism-white-supremacy-1492-1676)