Dorret/Flickr. Creative Commons.
The status of ‘slave’ has been inescapably linked to questions of race and racism since at least the late fifteenth century. The transatlantic slave trade set in motion a process through which slave, and the stigma attaching therein, were bound to Africa and Africans in European imaginations. European pretensions to moral ‘superiority’ were in turn codified and justified through a pseudoscience of race that emerged and flourished from the eighteenth century onwards. This ‘scientific racism’ asserted the existence of distinct and hierarchically ordered ‘types’ of human being, then racialised people from Africa as ‘black’ and encoded blackness with the dirt, dishonour, and dependency attributed to slaves. The history of transatlantic slavery is thus powerfully entwined with: 1) the emergence of the idea that race creates impermeable borders between flesh and blood human beings in terms of their capacities, moral worth and rights; and 2) a very specific form of antiblack racism.
Historical campaigns against transatlantic slavery did not substantially undermine or alter this racist foundation. Key white figures in the original European anti-slavery movement condemned the slave trade and slavery as institutions yet did not regard those they sought to emancipate as their peers or equals. Just as current campaigners against child prostitution revile the practice without believing children should be accorded the same civil and political rights as adults, anti-slavery pioneers such as William Wilberforce helped end the slave trade without considering people racialised as black as ‘ready’ for the exercise of freedom.
