Racial attitudes were forged in Europe’s internal debates before Cape settlement

Evidence

Racial dispositions were already being forged in intra-European intellectual debates, emanating a century earlier most notably from Spain and Portugal. Dutch experience with the slave trade and piracy predated settlement of the Cape by nearly a century and a half. Early racial disposition was forged from the amalgam of biblical equality and a sense of cultural superiority born of projected environmental differences. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1316

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ article’s theme of how Europe’s internal moral/intellectual debates preconditioned later colonial judgments. — connects to: Racism, not migrancy, should frame European postcolonial settlement history — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 29; Severe sex-ratio imbalance drove early intimate racial mixing at the Cape — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1315