| A "black moor" among rowers on a Moorish ship off the Portuguese coast.. Medieval Europeans had only sporadic encounters with Black Africans, usually via contacts with Muslims in Spain, North Africa, and the Middle East. |  |
Unraveling the Origins of Color Prejudice
Which came first? Did color prejudice arise as a consequence of black slavery? Or was antipathy to dark skin already embedded in Western culture?
In this "chicken and egg" debate the latter view has come to draw more support among historians, particularly in light of research by Carl Degler and Winthrop Jordan. The actual nature of these pre-existing attitudes is still unclear. Little evidence exists of race prejudice in Europe before the 16th century, medieval chauvinism being usually expressed in terms of cultural or religious differences.
This should hardly be surprising. Before the age of colonialism, Europeans rarely came into contact with racially dissimilar peoples. Depictions of black Africans were poorly executed, implying that the artist had never seen such men and women in the flesh. This ignorance stemmed from many causes: the more primitive state of travel by land and sea, Muslim control of trade routes between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, access to sources of non-African slaves, and an absence of slave societies apart from certain areas along the Mediterranean.
| A "black moor" among rowers on a Moorish ship off the Portuguese coast.. Medieval Europeans had only sporadic encounters with Black Africans, usually via contacts with Muslims in Spain, North Africa, and the Middle East. | |
The literature of the Middle Ages does attest to an awareness of differences in skin color, but these differences were seen as existing largely between individuals rather than between races. Descriptions of human complexion as "white," "brown" or "black" would correspond in modern usage to "fair," "tan" or "swarthy." Medieval Europeans had no awareness of belonging to a "white" race, if only for want of contact with other races.
This ignorance made them more sensitive to color differences among themselves, particularly between the sexes. Although about only a tenth of the difference separating blacks from whites, there does exist a perceptible dissimilarity in pigmentation between men and women. Male skin has more melanin and hemoglobin than does female skin, i.e., men are browner and ruddier; women, paler.
My own research, and that of Pierre van den Berghe, suggests that race-based attitudes to skin color grew out of a pre-existing matrix constructed around the differing complexions of men and women. In medieval romances, a fair complexion was deemed an essential mark of womanhood, the heroine being invariably compared to snow, ivory, ermine, swans, starlight, or briar blossoms. Attitudes to male skin color seem to have been more ambivalent. A man was considered handsome if fair-skinned; yet manly and courageous, if "brown." The tenth token of a knight of "strong Corage" was that he be of "broun coloure in al the body." Many noble English knights were named "the broun."
In the following essays, I will outline this older way of seeing human complexions and how it changed between two historical environments: an earlier one where skin color varied mainly between the sexes and a later one where ethnicity and race have assumed much more importance.
References
Curry, W.C. (1916). The Middle English Ideal of Personal Beauty, as found in the Metrical Romances, Chronicles, and Legends of the XIII, XIV, and XV Centuries. Baltimore: J.H. Furst Co.
Degler, C.N. (1958)."Slavery and the genesis of American race prejudice." Comparative Studies in Society and History 2:49-66, 488-495.
Devisse, J. and M. Mollat. (1979). L'image du Noir dans l'art occidental. Vol.II. Paris: Bibliothèque des arts.
Frost, P. (1990). "Fair women, dark men: the forgotten roots of colour prejudice." History of European Ideas 12: 669-679.
------ (1988). "Human skin color: a possible relationship between its sexual dimorphism and its social perception." Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 32: 38-58.
------ (1987). "Femmes claires, hommes foncés: les racines oubliées du préjugé de couleur." Anthropologie et sociétés 11:135-149.
Irwin, E. (1974). Colour Terms in Greek Poetry. Toronto: Hakkert.
Jordan, W. (1968). White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro 1550-1812. Williamsburg: University of North Carolina Press.
van den Berghe, P. L. and P. Frost (1986). "Skin color preference, sexual dimorphism, and sexual selection: a case of gene-culture co-evolution?" Ethnic and Racial Studies 9: 87-113.
Wagatsuma, H. (1967). "The social perception of skin color in Japan." Daedalus 96:407-443.