Franklin ranked even Europeans on a whiteness hierarchy inherited from England.
Evidence
The imprimatur of the racial order that had developed for centuries within Europe was decidedly on the mind of Benjamin Franklin when he wrote: “The Number of purely white People in the World is proportionately very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1701
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- CANDY: Franklin’s ranking of ‘swarthy’ Spaniards, Italians, Russians, and Swedes as less white than Anglo-Saxons is an easy conversation piece about how recent and contingent whiteness is.
- SHARE: Would delight anyone working on whiteness studies or the history of racial categories.