How many races did he think there were? And what did he think of miscegenation?
I’m not sure he specified, but it would have to be at least 3 to make sense of the context he was addressing. There is no indication he had a problem with “miscegation” (which is a deeply biased term I despise).
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It would be fairly odd if races with separate origins were freely interbreeding, though. Wouldn’t it? Some sort of orthogenesis would be required on the genetic level.
La Peyrere was writing in the 1600s and thought all races were equally in the image of God and invited to partake in salvation as the family of God.
Tellingly, apparently without anti-Semitism (in my understanding, which could be corrected), the “Jews” were the privileged race, and La Peyrere was not a Jew. The other races were Gentiles (and there was at least an Old World and New World variety). So he did not have his own race as the top of any hierarchy.
His intended point is that the first people’s of the New World were equal to (non-Jewish) Europeans, in that both groups did not descend from Adam and Eve, and were therefore on equal footing.
As for miscegation, it is important to remember this was more about marriage and racial purity than interracial sex. This explains why white slaveholders were free to rape their slaves, and even have children with them, but they should marry white wives to produce white children to carry forward the fairer race. On the other hand, a white woman marrying a non-white man was reprehensible, because it polluted the pure stock and her children threatened to pollute the pure gene pool, because of course she wouldn’t be allowed a white man on the side to provide white children to future generations.
Sorry if that sounds crass, but I’m just trying to explain the logic behind the absurdity. It actually makes internal sense, even though it is in conflict with the evidence. It’s important to understand the internal sense of it to fully dismantle it.
Getting back to La Peyrere, miscegation wasn’t his concern.
It is probably important that he was French, not German or English. French were not occupied with genetic purity; for them it was about cultural (usually linguistic) purity. There is a big difference in French colonies for this reason, eg between Canada and the USA. Canada ended up having far less racially driven politics in the end; there were atrocities too, but often in service of the obliteration of first people cultures. They entirely encouraged integration and intermarriage, as long as you spoke perfect French. That is cultural imperialism, and it had victims (as is in the news now) but it isn’t the same racially driven logic we are grappling with in the US.
Some of the Canadians or French might have comments or clarifications of course. @nwrickert @Faizal_Ali
Sometimes one does need to do that. When I was in law school, one year we had a class in the “law of slavery.” Not, obviously, much of a currently-usable subject, but interesting stuff if you wanted to understand some aspects of the practice. I recall that at one point I had an academic curiosity over the miscegenation laws, and discovered that if one went to older editions of popular legal encyclopedias there was a wealth of information on it – while the (current) Corpus Juris Secundum had no “Miscegenation” title, the original Corpus Juris volumes, available in any major law library’s stacks, did.
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Are you even sure that he distinguished races? Sounds as if he’s just lumping everyone into “gentiles” there. Jews would seem the only race, based on that description.
He was dealing with specific challenge of people in the new world. So yes he was claiming they had different parentage than Europeans. That’s was a foundational premise.
(Btw, this is covered in detail in the GAE. You really need to read it)
He did not have a well developed hierarchy of races that specifically marked out different races. That’s why it is hard to say how many races he perceived. That sort of systematization is something that came later from other people, many of whom were “naturalists”, I.e. early biologists. It wasn’t part of his project, which was not actually oriented around racial categorization and supremacy.
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But does that constitute a racial division?
I have read it. Don’t recall any discussion of races.
So how can you tell that he thought there were such things?
He was not arguing that there were innate biological differences, so no. What he was grappling with was geographical division, not racial differneces.
Look at the chapter on “The Error of Polygenesis”. It is almost entirely about race. Which book do you read? I wonder.
He does not lay out a list of races and characteristics. Perhaps he had one in the privacy of his own mind, but I am unaware of him ever putting it in print, and that wasn’t the motivating point he was making, nor was it relevant to his point.
(Of course, I am not a historian, and invite correction and education @TedDavis and @TWReynolds )
In that case it’s not relevant to the topic of race.
Sorry, can’t. The book has been returned to the library. But races and polygenesis seem to be separate topics. Different created or evolved groups could correspond to races, or not.
Except, almost immediately, his theory becomes the framework for racist theories of origins.
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Then that’s the point at which it identifies races, and the idea that races are created by racists is supported rather than refuted.
It is complex again, because there are several people historically that though (incorrectly) there were intrinsic differences between races, but also thought all races should be treated equally. One great example might be Abraham Lincoln. He incorrectly thought that races were real, but also sought emancipation and for their equal rights.
One could try to dismiss him as racist politician, but I would not recommend doing so. But this view was not a fluke. That might have been the dominant view among white abolitionists at the time. They weren’t racists, but some of their efforts to make sense of race do seem very racist based on what we know now. It is important to keep in mind that they did not have the same information we have now. From within their context, given the information they had at the time, what they said was definitively not racist. However, knowing what we know how, in our context, saying similar things would be racist.
The question isn’t whether people who believe there are races are racists but whether those who come up with the idea are racists. As I said, many people just unquestioningly believe what they’re told.
That would be correct. He was a child of the 1920’s which came with a baseline of racism. Could we call it “folk racism”? I will say that I was quite proud of my grandfather, and hope to be as kind and gentle in my senior years. Looking back it is really inspiring to see that racism is curable.
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It’s more than just empathy need.
A lot of people are empathetic, but just truly confused about what the science is. Race is so charged, they aren’t sure if they are hearing political correctness from scientists, or scientific findings. To make matters worse, many scientists are just sloganeering, and have never actually looked at the evidence around race for themselves. So there is a legitimate public education gap around the science of race.
As for me, I’ve been putting in some sustained effort into studying this more. At this point I have some papers in the works too. It is a deep and important area of ongoing scientific and philosophical study, and there is a real need for scientists to break it down for public consumption, without oversimplifying in a way that causes societal damage or undermines real understanding.
I don’t know what the future holds for PS, but it seems that the conflict narratives around origins are going to eventually subside, and become increasingly obscure. Maybe these conversations on the science and history and philosophy of race will come to dominate. Such a change would not be bad for us as a group.
For good or bad, this is one area where old white guys have less credibility than those from minority populations. There are many things you can say without drawing criticism that no scientist of European descent would feel comfortable saying.
What do you feel needs to be said that you can’t say?
My personal experience: you can find some degree of discrimination almost everywhere. It seems to be a natural human phenomenon.
It is mostly cultural rather than racial. That is, people tend to look down on those from other cultures. A great deal of what we count as knowledge is actually knowledge of cultural conventions. And yes, epistemology is mostly wrong about that. So people from other cultures lack some of our knowledge of cultural conventions. And that gives an appearance of inferiority.
Yes, American racism is different. There is a stigma due to past slavery. This has much improved over time, particularly among liberals – you can see the differences on university campuses. But more conservative groups have resisted these changes, and continue to resist them.
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