by KARL STEEL
EDIT: several days on. It's come to my attention that perhaps some people have not quite understood what this post is doing. Let me make my claims as clear as possible.
1. the transhistorical existence of a category called "white people" is a fiction
2. the invention of that fiction - roughly speaking, over the course of the seventeenth century - with all the legal and ideological support that accompanied and enabled it, also accompanied - not incidentally - the massive, systematic exposure of millions of Africans and African-descended people to rape by these "white people."
3. Therefore, any claim that "white people" are, for example, the heroes in the history of anti-rape advocacy is an appalling error.
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I'd call this post
White Skin, White Mask if the title hadn't already been taken many times. Before you go any further, if you haven't already, read
Jonathan Hsy's MLA roundup, and also
Eileen Joy's breathtaking farewell to ITM post.
We've posted often on racial fantasies here (a lot! here's a sample:
here,
here,
here [
from 2006],
here,
here,
here, and
here). And in one of my favorite writing experiences,
Jeffrey and I co-wrote a review essay on several medieval books on cultural encounters, medievalism, and race.
And here I go again, probably not for the last time.
A couple years ago, while teaching Gerald of Wales’ History and Topography of Ireland, one
of my students asked, “Why’s he so nasty about the Irish? Aren’t they the same
race?” My reply: “Not back then they weren’t.” What a perfect hook that was for
class discussion!
The student meant “white.” Any reader of this blog
knows how much work we have done to resist the mistaken idea of a “white”
Middle Ages. To be sure, many medieval writers found it useful to believe that dark
skin was ugly, even diabolical. Some found it melancholic (as the word literally
means “black bile”), a point
you might read alongside Drew Daniel's book.
But not infrequently, they believed similarly negative things about
light
skin. Certainly, “white as snow” was one standard description of beautiful women,
whether Saracen or Christian. Countering that, we can add "pale as a Jew":
the early fifteenth-century Canarian,
an inadvertently mock epic about the attempted conquest of the Canary Islands,
includes a catechism for the Canary Islanders, explaining that Jews were
distinguished by being “descoulourez” by fear: they were pale, in other words,
excessively light-skinned. M. Lindsey Kaplan’s “
The
Jewish Body in Black and White in Medieval and Early Modern England” (
Philological Quarterly 2013) observes
that late medieval antisemitism quite often described Jews as melancholic, as “naturally
timid” (44, quoting from a 14
th-century Parisian quodlibet), and
therefore as naturally “livid,” an uncertain color, like lead, that
could be black, blue,
or pale.
 |
"first white woman": Icelandic theater photo.
Thanks Dan Remein for sending it to me. |
And although modern racists since the later nineteenth
century have made much of the supposed whiteness of the Norse in Vinland some
thousand years ago, the Vinland sagas themselves don’t think of this encounter
between the Norse and the “Skraelings” as an encounter of white and, say, “red.”
As my students and I regularly discover, whatever so-called "white" America's interest in these sagas, they actually and primarily concern the thirteenth-century Icelandic difficulty with their own religious heritage: how is it possible to
praise one's pagan ancestors?
As for the “Skraelings,” one of the sagas describes a their leader as “tall
and handsome [vænn],” which is
precisely the same language the sagas as a whole use to describe any martial
hero, Icelandic or otherwise. The Vinland sagas say that the rest of the "Skraelings" have tangled hair and enormous eyes and are –
presumably apart from the leader – “ugly” [illiligir],
and either “dark” (svartir) or “pale” (folleit), without, that is,
any obvious singularly distinctive hair or skin color, though they are still
marked as somehow different.
Furthermore, neither of the Vinland sagas offers a
homogeneous ‘Eurocentric’ identity reducible to whiteness. Eric the Red’s Saga has among its Norse a German explorer, and the Greenland
Saga two Scots, differentiated from the text’s norm, as in common in medieval
texts, through culinary and cultural differences: the German knows grapes and
wine, while the Scots, wearing what the texts think of as strange Scottish
clothing, are fast runners, swifter than deer.
The paragraph above, and the last sentences of the previous
one, come from my article “Bad Heritage: The American Viking Fantasy, from the
Nineteenth Century to Now,” intended for a non-medievalist audience, and, knock
on wood, coming out later this year. I’ll quote one more paragraph as a
teaser, and as a rebuke of
this
eminent University of Chicago medieval historian:
Modern fans of the Vikings speak of them as representing the “organic unity of
a race” (Else Christiansen, qtd in Gardell,
“Wolf Age Pagans” 386) and offer up “Scandinavians and the Scandinavian
culture as ancient and therefore pure” (Blaagaard
11). But without a single pre-Christian Norse religion (indeed, without a
pre-Christian Norse religion entirely free of Christian influences), there is
no “pure” and ancient “folkway” that can be contrasted with Christianity,
modernity, cosmopolitanism, and all the other presumptive faults of modernity.
No single origin is available. While the medieval Norse were no less free of
racist taxonomies and anxieties than any other medieval group, their chief
concerns were not with the modern category of whiteness, not least of all
because they did not think of skin color as the primary racial determiner (for example).
Claims of “ancestral roots” purport to be historical claims, but they lack the
appreciation for heterogeneity and constantly shifting, interacting cultures,
riven by internal disputes and negotiations, necessary for any truly historical
analysis. Fascination with the seafaring exploits of Vikings, when attached exclusively to the Vikings, remain provincial: from the North Sea
to the Indian Ocean, Norse, Croat, Swahili, Persian, and Chinese sailors all found
new success in the ninth century (Sindbaek).
In short, the love of Vikings [or for that matter “white people”] is obviously
a love of a fantasized past rather than a love of history. In its more and less
benign forms, modern amateur Viking enthusiasm should collapse when it
encounters these facts. Yet it persists, of course, which means, finally, we
must examine what the Viking fantasy does for its adherents.
EDIT: a couple hours later, I need to address one more point. The post I linked to above makes claims about the centrality of medieval "white" people, and especially "white men," to anti-rape advocacy and anti-rape legislation, without discussing, say, the approval of the rape of peasant women in Andrew the Chaplain's
De arte honeste amandi (often translated as
The Art of Courtly Love):
And if you should, by some chance, fall in love with some of their women [i.e., peasant women], be careful to puff them up with lots of praise and then, when you find a convenient place, do not hesitate to take what you seek and to embrace them by force (Perry trans., 150)
The key term in the title is
honeste, a word of perhaps uncertain meaning, but which might be read with
reference to this; do not ignore the real limits of Andrew's arguments.
But we can also think of this argument in the context of America, one of whose founding crimes is its profiting from the systematic, massive rape of enslaved people from Africa or of African ancestry. Any account of anti-rape advocacy in America must have, for example, Ida B. Wells at its center; it should read Saidiya Hartman's "Venus in Two Acts," or the helpless horror about witnessing rape in Olaudah Equiano's
Interesting Narrative. It should understand that Virginia profited enormously from the sale of enslaved children down south, which meant, of course, that so-called white men were selling their own children. Any account of anti-slave advocacy that seeks to racialize that history should read as much, if not more of, Thomas Thistlewood's diary as can be stood.
So-called white people do have a central role in the history of anti-rape advocacy, and that role has been, since the invention of white people, by and large, the enemy.
