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I wrote a preamble to this piece relating it to a recent debate over postmodernism and Enlightenment. Since it got a bit overlong, I decided to repost as a standalone entry. But you can still read Goldner’s excellent essay on “Race and the Enlightenment” below.
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Race and the Enlightenment
Loren Goldner
Race Traitor
August 1997
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Part one
Pre-Enlightenment phase: Spain, Jews, and Indians1
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It is not often recognized that, prior to the seventeenth and eighteenth 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 seventeenth century, in very specific social circumstances, was preceded by centuries of a very different vision of Africans2 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 seventeenth 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, Muslims, and “heathens”;3 beginning around the 1670s, they began to speak of race, and color-coded hierarchies of races.
What was this alternative “epistemological grid” through which, prior to the 1670s, the West encountered the “Other”?