Locke racialized only Africans, marking other non-Europeans regionally

Evidence

In his History of Navigation from its Original to the Year 1704, for example, Locke characterizes only the people of Africa in racial or color terms (as “black,” “near black,” “Moor,” or “tending to Moor”), and refers to them exclusively from the time of the European expeditionary voyages onwards. Those of Arabia or the Bast Indies, by contrast, he characterized regionally. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 28

Categorization

• SHARE: A strikingly concrete textual detail — Locke’s own History of Navigation applies color terms only to Africans — worth sending to anyone working on the genealogy of racial categories in early modern texts.

Related

• Regions are constituted in part by their specific racial arrangements (similarity 0.79)