SOCI 302 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Selective Breeding, Color Term, Sub-Saharan Africa
Week 2- European History of Race
• how do we know that racialization that we have today did not begin with Ancient
Egyptians?
o A lot of racial intermixing, there was no racial prejudice reported, disagreed over
cultural matter but not race
• In what ways did Alleyne claim that Greek and Roman ethnocentrism surpassed all
others?
o Romans were more powerful, gave them superiority and made them feel like
they were better than others
o Depended on their culture, they thought it was better than others
• Greeks thought they were better than everybody else, being ethnocentric
• Greeks and Romans were the first to use coloured terms
• Age of enlightenment reinforced racist ideas
• In near East, white can represent ill-health or beauty
Ancient Romans
• Culturally and intellectually depended on the Greeks
• In Latin language, there is clear connotative antithesis between black and white, which
is not different from modern western European languages
o Albus- physical colour term for white
• They also had a pair of words meaning black
o Ate lak – physical colour term as opposed to ablus
o Niger as opposed to candidus
Origins of Christianity
• When Christianity was adopted by Rome, it was grafted onto a social religious system
that had already developed a racial and ethnic hierarchy
• In middle east, where Christianity begun, there was no polarization of black and white
o This begun in Europe and persisted during the Christian era
• Face of Christ is portrayed differently in ancient iconography
• Europeans transpose a negative, pejorative connotation black and white (dark and light)
• Catholic church was involved in slavery
Renaissance & the Enlightenment
• Renaissance- all western Europe was Christianised
o Rediscovered ancient ethnocentric sources about race and accepted myths
about the monstrous sub-Saharan Africa
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