Racial hierarchies adapted to enslavers’ economic needs and cultural preferences

Evidence

Carl Linnaeus created a hierarchy within the animal kingdom and a hierarchy within the human kingdom, and this human hierarchy was based on race. His “enlightened” peers were also creating human hierarchies; within the European kingdom, they placed Irish people, Jews, Romani, and southern and eastern Europeans at the bottom. Enslavers and slave traders were creating similar ethnic hierarchies within the African kingdom. Enslaved Africans in North America were coming mainly from seven cultural-geopolitical regions: Angola (26 percent), Senegambia (20 percent), Nigeria (17 percent), Sierra Leone (11 percent), Ghana (11 percent), Ivory Coast (6 percent), and Benin (3 percent). Since the hierarchies were usually based on which ancestral groups were thought to make the best slaves, or whose ways most resembled those of Europeans, different enslavers with different needs and different cultures had different hierarchies. Generally, Angolans were classed as the most inferior Africans, since they were priced so cheaply in slave markets (due to their greater supply). — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 205

Categorization

• QUESTION: The hierarchy-follows-economic-demand claim (Angolans cheap due to supply, therefore classed most inferior) is a crisp test case for Kendi’s inversion: does price drive ranking, or ranking drive price?
• XREF: connects to: The civilizational standard quietly re-encoded race as economic capacity — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 83