I'm sure that many people will discuss the fact that our readings primarily focused on the physical aspects of race. It's unsurprising that the first published essay on race was mostly about the differences in appearance that Bernier saw. In a culture where race or discussion about race did not really exist, as Dr J mentioned in class, these foreign people would seem bizarre and worthy of attention. If Bernier could not communicate with any of the other people he met, all he really had to work with for his essay was what he could visibly see. While it would seem like we should have progressed beyond Bernier, and in many regards we have, we still have similar discourse and perceptions in our society. If someone has multiple racial backgrounds, he or she will most likely be identified by whatever is most visible to other people. The most obvious example of this is President Obama. Obama has multiple racial heritages, however, he is discussed primarily as 'black' or 'African American'. He is hailed as our first black president, which is true, but this is hugely because of how people perceive him. People see him as a black man, thus they project that singular racial identity onto him--despite multiple sources saying exactly what his racial background is. It's curious to see that Bernier and much of America share similar ways of describing race.
It was mentioned in class how in our society race signals a lot because of the history and modern culture our society has with racism. However, as it was also pointed out, Bernier himself was putting value judgments and words within his descriptions of other races. The Lapp people were beastly 'creatures'. He seemed to imply good things when other races had European like qualities. Do you think this is just because of a tendency to assume one self is the 'proper' way thus anything else is a deviation, therefore possibly bad? Without the history, why did Bernier write the way he did?
In 1684 when Bernier wrote this essay I would assume that white people would believe that they belonged to the “original race”. So regardless if Bernier personally believed that every other race was a deviation, which he may have, is irrelevant because he had an obligation to appeal to a certain audience. This audience being the Catholic Church, whom would have had the power at the time to either approve or destroy any creditability Bernier, may have had. I’m not sure if Bernier was religious or but just like we mentioned in class, it was probably more than a coincidence that his final claim was constant with the Bible.
ReplyDeleteGiven the circumstances Bernier was writing under, I do think that his tendency was to assume that everything different from himself and others like him was a deviation. Because he was the first one to divide people primarily by their skin color, he did not have anything but his findings to go off of. In a way, he used what was familiar to him as a measuring stick when approaching the unknown. I do agree with Stanton that Bernier had to market his work to a particular audience. If he didn't, it wouldn't have been received well. The history that came before Bernier's work probably did influence the way that he wrote because it shaped what he was looking for and how he viewed what he found.
ReplyDeleteI think Bernier wrote like this because in his mind, it was the only logical way for there to be so many different types of people. In later history white colonist believed that they had to educated the "savage" humans that were in both the Americas and Africa. They believed that since they did not dress like them, or talk like them that they were superior. The White Man's Burden is something that completely changed the Europeans treated their colonies, and I think that mind set is something that Bernier starts to articulate here.
ReplyDeleteNot to play the same tune, but Stanton has a great point. The audience had a *huge* hand in how Bernier interpreted his findings. But beyond the Church, the publishers and consumers of his essays, consider the socio-political and economic influences that surrounded Bernier. By the time he was writing his work on race, the various European peoples were empires. They were conquering all kinds of lands, peoples, assets, etc., and if one made a quick comparison, white folks seemed to be more advanced technologically. In that mindset, it... uh... unfortunately made sense that whites were therefore superior because they were more advanced (completely ignoring cultural understanding and differences here, I'm sorry). Bernier's wording makes sense, even though he's harshly inaccurate, but it makes sense given his immediate surroundings and influences.
ReplyDeleteI think that the moral judgments attached to physical features carried over as the result of observed behaviors and cultural differences. In a course on medieval Spain, we read pieces of a "travel guide" in which the descriptions of the various people included a series of overt moral judgments that were clearly based on the author's interpretation of cultural differences although they were categorized as if they were objective descriptions. In one of my Spanish classes, we read some of the writings of Bartolome de las Casas, a 16th century priest, and later friar, who traveled to the New World. He observed the torture and genocide carried out against the Native Americans and wrote an appeal to the king, claiming that there was a Christian responsibility to the native people that was being ignored. The conquistadors in question justified their actions in the name of king and country because while the Native Americans looked vaguely similar to the Spanish people, they clearly weren't civilized (in the way that their torturers were). I think that the physical features began to bear the weight of the different historical and spiritual traditions of the different peoples.
ReplyDeleteI think one of the points you're really trying to make is that the kind of evaluation that Bernier used stil exists today and that it shouldn't, given the advancements we've made. I agree that Bernier's reactions were somewhat natural at that time. Although in contrast to previous commentors, I think it's important to point out that we have no idea why he wrote as he did, and it would be wrong to speculate as to whether or not he really believed what he was writing. I also think you make a good point that this hasn't changed over the last few hundred years. I think the reason it still exists to the extent it does today is that people want to think they know more than they actually do. In order to do this, they latch on to the superficial things that they can know (appearance) and make it bigger than it is. Using your example, people see that President Obama looks black. Instead of taking that at face value, they start saying he looks black and is therefore also x,y,z. They tack on knowledge through the things they do know to give the appearance, both to themselves and others, that they know more than they actually do.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Bernier was probably trying to appeal to an audience more similar to his physical construct and that many of his notions might have been caused by his own flawed perception of the European race because he was too a European. However, I find it interesting that in his discussion of women, he did not hesitate to suggest that beautiful women existed outside of his own race and even proceeded to argue that some groups were more beautiful than the women of European descent. He wrote that the women of the Indies had a "vivid and brilliant" yellow skin complexion compared to French women with "ugly and livid paleness of jaundice". This completely through off the entire dynamic of the essay when I reached that section of the reading. He no longer made the "European" race seem superior than all the others. They were brought down to the same level and even flawed in some sense.
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