Slavery and Race

“But among barbarians no distinction is made between women and slaves, because there is no natural ruler among them: they are a community of slaves, male and female. Wherefore the poets say, "It is meet that Hellenes should rule over barbarians;" as if they thought that the barbarian and the slave were by nature one.” Aristotle, “Politics”

The idea that slaves are born to be slaves is ancient. Aristotle maintains that there are people intended by nature to be slaves, and notes the opinion of the Greeks that non-Greeks were meant by nature to be slaves but that it was unnatural for a Greek to be a slave. The Greeks would point to the slavish obedience that non-Greeks showed to their Kings as proof of their inherently slavish nature.

Modern science has two words which should be introduced here. Phenotype and Genotype. Phenotype is the observable nature of an organism. Genotype is the coding that is inherited. The degree to which Phenotype is the result of Genotype is a matter which is continually being debated. The more we learn, the less absolute Genotype appears in producing Phenotype.

Throughout history, people have assumed that what they saw, the Phenotype was the product of inheritance or Genotype. The Greeks considered non-Greeks to be born slaves. Most of the non-Greeks around them were of Indo-European stock and basically the same race that the Greeks were. The Athenians considered themselves to be a separate race from the people of Megara, a Greek City about 50 miles from Athens. The word race itself has changed meaning with changes in society.

Athens was founded when Theseus combined various separate tribes together.

Yet a couple of centuries later under Pericles, the Athenians believed in an Athenian ‘Race’ and limited citizenship to people born of Athenian parents on both sides.

According to tradition Rome was founded by Romulus and Remus in the following fashion,

Thus from its very beginning Rome was a multi-’racial’ settlement. From it’s legendary founding Rome was probably the most ‘racially’ integrated city in Italy. This story was widely known. Yet in the time of Augustus the idea of a Roman ‘Race’ had become well established. There was great concern that the pure Roman Race was being lost in a sea of immigrants. Augustus passed laws to preserve the Roman Race by promoting marriage and motherhood.

In small tribal societies race means the tribe. When tribes unite into larger groups it means the group. When groups get larger yet the size of the ‘race’ increases as well. Dumas in his novels uses the word race to refer to families. Montesquieu in “The Spirit of the Laws” uses the term race to designate different French Royal Dynasties,

Each aristocratic family was considered a distinct race and, of course, racially superior to people of the lower classes, especially that most inferior race the peasants and serfs. Each Scottish Clan was a distinct race. The English always considered the Irish an inferior race and the Scots a barbarous race. Race has never in history had any constant scientific meaning as far as group size or genetic uniformity is concerned. Race has always been used to assert the superiority of one group over another group. This has not stopped people throughout history from assuming a biological basis for racial differences.

The word race today is more abused than ever before in history. As the origins of humanity become clearer the “out of Africa” theory becomes more and more credible. Humans evolved in Africa and left it only recently. The people of Africa are the product of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. The people outside of Africa are the descendants of one small group which existed in Africa about 170,000 years ago and left Africa about 40,000 years ago. In this sense, all peoples outside of Africa are one race. Africa itself holds about 12 different races because humanity existed there far longer and there was more time for genetic variations to develop. There is more genetic variation in Blacks than in the rest of the ‘races’ of the world combined.

Calling blacks a race is meaningless in a biological sense. Some Blacks from around the Horn of Africa are descendants of the same group which left Africa around 40,000 years ago and the same ‘race’ as Vikings and Chinese. Others are distinct and different races with distinct and different genetic inheritances. You cannot make valid scientific statements about the genetic attributes of a race where no actual genetic race exists.

The history of the concept of race shows a strong bias towards attributing to genes what is the result of environment. The idea has popped up consistently while the meaning of the word race and the number of people contained in the same ‘race’ has changed by several orders of magnitude. Each time the definition of race changed to match current social conditions, it proved that the previous attribution of differences to race was false. It is impossible to find a single instance in history where this idea has been correct. After several thousand years of repeating the same mistake it is time to assume a strongly skeptical attitude towards anyone who attributes differences in ability between groups to race rather than culture or environment. This is especially true when people talk of the black ‘race’. There is no black ‘race’ in a genetic sense.

Aristotle’s opinion that some people are intended by nature to be slaves must be considered one of his glaring mistakes. It reflects the prejudices and assumptions of his time.