Here is Jeff Flynn-Paul on what early Western explorers believed about the people (“Indians”) they encountered in the new world of the Americas:
Where does that lead us in terms of European prejudice against the Indians they found in the Americas? The historian Alden T. Vaughan summed up the longstanding consensus on European prejudice toward Indians in a 1982 American Historical Review article with the following words:
“Not until the middle of the eighteenth century did most Anglo-Americans view Indians as significantly different in color from themselves, and not until the nineteenth century did red become the universally accepted color label for American Indians. To read later perceptions of Indian pigmentation into the first centuries of racial contact is fallacious, because, in general, it distorts the nature of early ethnic relations and, in particular, it obscures the evolution of Anglo-American attitudes toward the Indians.
Anglo-Americans believed that American Indians were approximately as light-skinned as Europeans-with all its implications-and thus would be assimilated into colonial society as soon as they succumbed to English social norms and protestant theology.”
Vaughan’s statement lays out quite nicely what scholars have always known, namely that Europeans did not think of the Indians as biologically different from themselves, until more than 250 years after Columbus landed. If they thought of Indians as biologically inferior, this happened much later; it was widespread for only a short period, and we will see how even then such beliefs were far from universal.
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Fynn-Paul, continued:
If early European explorers and settlers did not believe that Amerindians were of a different race, what did their science and philosophy tell them?
Most people looked first and foremost to their religion. Christianity is difficult to force into the category of “racist” philosophies, because Christian theologians taught that all mankind was a single human family man family desecended from Adam and Eve. There was a longstanding tradition in Christian iconography that the Three Magi represented the three known continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe they were accordingly represented in let medieval Europe with appropriate features and skin color. It was believed, however, that it was the mission of the church to unite all these pople as one holy family in Christ, ideally with as much gentleness and persuasion as possible. The Cathedral of St. Barbara at Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic, for example, contains a mural in which all the people of the Earth are represented peacefully hearing and accepting the Gospel as one global people, including Natives of the Americas. It was this global vision of redeemed humanity that motivated Queen Isabella to welcome the Amerindians as subjects of the Crown of Castile, something the French kings were also to do with the Amerindians of Quebec.
The science of the day also said next to nothing about different “races” of people based on skin color. A tradition dating back to ancient times held that humans were essentially the same all over the globe, but that the closer they got to the sun (i.e., to the equator), the darker their skin became. It was believed that if light-skinned people spent enough time in the south, they too would become dark. It should come as no surprise that late medieval people, who classified both bats and bumblebees as birds, were not attuned to any fine points of racial difference. The contrast with their far more scientific nineteenth-century descendants is tremendous.
The prevalence of geography and latitude rather than “race” or innate characteristics in early explorers’ thinking is what led Columbus to conclude that the Indians he found in the Caribbean were about the same color as the Canary Islanders but not as dark as the sub-Saharan Africans,” Columbus reasoned that if he traveled farther south in the Americas, he would find darker-skinned people. His contemporaries also believed that as they traveled farther North in North America, they would find lighter skinned Indians.
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Fynn-Paul, continued:
Based on the strength of this anti racist prejudice, Europeans well into the seventeenth century believed that North American Indians were essentially the same color as themselves. They believed that the skin color of the Old and New World people was differentiated by latitude rather than by continent. Dozens of sources relate to us their belief that North Americans were “born white” as babies but only became darker due to exposure to the sun and the thick ointments spread over them by their parents. Evidence for this attitude is widespread as we shall see.
Writing in 2017, the scholar Joan-Pau Rubiés summed up these Christian and proto-scientific strains in European thinking on race in the following way:
“In early modern Europe and up to the mid-eighteenth century, cultural diversity was usually explained with reference to climate, religion and national genealogy, without any serious equivalent to the racist ideologies that arose to prominence throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While there were some examples of religious persecutions, discriminatory colonial polices and philosophical attempts to classify the peoples of the world which involved some racialist principles… [this was done] within the framework of a monogenist understanding of the history of humankind.”
The term “monogenist” refers to the Christian teaching that humans were descended from common ancestors and would one day be united again under the church. It took several centuries for these prejudices against racism to be overcome to the extent that the more egregious nineteenth-century racial theorists managed to do.
[Quotations taken from the book, Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World.]
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