Enacting Slavery in Medicine

1. ANTH 3559:
Race, Science, and the Law:
Knowledge and Power in the U.S.
and Beyond
Lecture 3: Enacting Slavery

2. Community Guidelines
and Expectations
• Be respectful. While I encourage
debate, disagreement, and
dissenting ideas, we should always
seek to engage in class discussions
in a respectful manner.
• Recording policy: Class discussions
should not be recorded.
• Laptop policy: You may use laptops
to access class readings. But I may
ask you to close your screens if
people are not participating or
paying attention in class
discussions.
• Other guidelines?

3. Al-Andalus:
Proto-Racism in Early Modern Europe
(c.1400-1600)
• Most historians and anthropologists argue
that the modern notion of ”race” developed
in the 18th and 19th centuries. However,
certain “proto-racisms” did develop much
earlier.
• From 711 – 756 CE, most of Iberia (Spain and
Portugal) was conquered by the Umayyad
Caliphate from North Africa. Under Moorish
rule, Christians lived under Muslim dominion.
• The Reconquista was a centuries-long violent
conflict (756-1492) between Christian
Iberians and their Moorish rulers.
• During and after the Reconquista in the
Iberian Peninsula, European Christians
strongly distinguished themselves from Jews
and Muslims.
• In 1492, the Reconquista was completed with
the fall of Alhambra Castle in Granada.

5. Limpieza de
Sangre
(Blood Purity)
• The legal concept of limpieza de sangre developed in Spain around the
15th century to differentiate between “Old Christians” of Catholic
heritage, and “New Christians” or “conversos” (converts) of known
or suspected Muslim of Jewish ancestry.
• In 1492, King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I expelled all Jews
from Spain and Portugal under the Alhambra Decree. Jewish
Spaniard had four months to convert to Christianity or to leave the
kingdoms of Castille and Aragon (Spain).
• However, Jew-to-Christian converts were treated as lower caste
members of societies. Limpieza de sangre laws prevented them holding
office in Church or State.
• Limpieza de sangre laws also prohibited marriage between supposedly
“pure” Old Christians and “impure” New Christians.
Alhambra Castle, Granada

6. Pedro and María
Catholic Church. Brief on behalf of
Pedro Francisco of Molines, in the case
versus versus María Aguiló concerning
the fact that he should neither marry
nor endow her. (c.1700).
“…siendo como queda provado la referida
Aguiló descendiente de Judios, y estos ser
infames, por dicha infamia, aunque huviera
Esponsales, no deveria casarse dicho
Molines con ella; por ser de limpia
sangre…”
“…being that the aforementioned [Maria]
Aguiló has proven to be the descendant of
Jews, and these being disgraced, by said
infamy, even if they had been engaged,
said Molines should not marry her;
because he is of clean blood…”
Source: https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2021/09/limpieza-de-sangre-legal-applications-of-the-spanish-doctrine-of-blood-purity/

7. Blood!
What is the significance of blood?
• Blood is both a biological and social
category. Sometimes references to
blood denote the biological substance;
sometimes it denotes social bonds and
ties.
• Blood is a metaphor for kinship, family,
lineage, descent, ancestry, inheritance,
ethnicity, nation, and ‘race’.
• The biological and social definitions of
blood are often conflated and
confused.

8. Slavery
• Slavery is the ownership of a person as property, especially in regard to
their labor.
• Slavery is not a modern phenomenon. Slavery existed in many parts of
the world for thousands of years.
• Other that feudal relations between serfs and masters, slavery was
illegal in most parts of Christian Europe in Medieval and Early Modern
Europe.
• The word “slave” probably comes from Slav, or Slavic-speaking peoples
from Eastern Europe. Thousands of Slavic people, especially women,
were trafficked into slavery in the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary
states in northern Africa (c.900-1500).
• Prior to the 1400s, Arabic slavers had been enslaving sub-Saharan
Africans for centuries. They trafficked them to North Africa and Arabia.
• In the 1400s and 1500s, Portuguese and Spanish merchants became
involved in the African slave trade.

9. Papal Authority and Modern
Slavery
• In 1455, Pope Nicholas V (1397-1455) decreed that
slavery of European Christians was illegal, but he
empower King Alfonso of Portugal to enslave sub-
Saharan Africans because they were “pagans.”
• Papal bull (1455): “We [therefore] weighing all and
singular the premises with due meditation, and
noting that since we had formerly by other letters of
ours granted among other things free and ample
faculty to the aforesaid King Alfonso—to invade,
search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all
Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies
of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms,
dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions,
and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever
held and possessed by them and to reduce their
persons to perpetual slavery.”
Source:
https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/african_laborers_for_a_new_emp/pope_nicolas_v_and_the_port
ugu

10. Native Slavery in the
Americas
• Following Christopher Columbus’
arrival in Hispaniola in 1492, Spanish
colonialists murdered and enslaved
thousands of Native people under
the pretext that they were not
Christian.
• According to the descriptions of the
abolitionist Dominican priest
Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-
1566), in his essay ”A Short
Description of the Destruction of the
Indies” (1542), Native people were
eighter slaughtered or pressed into
slavery.
• Spanish colonialists regarded slavery
as a more “benevolent” alternative to
mass murder.
• Eventually, European public opinion
turned against the enslavement of
Natives.

11. The Middle Passage:
Enslaving Africans in
the Americas

12. Human Cargo:
12 Million Lives
Bought and Sold
• From the 1500s to the 1800s,
European slavers transported
approximately 12 million Africans
across the Atlantic Ocean as human
property.
• European colonists believed that
Africans were better suited for
plantation chattel slavery than
Natives. African people had more
biological resistance to Eurasian
diseases. They were also deemed
better equipped to labor in tropical
and subtropical climates than
indentured Europeans.

14. Black History in 3 Minutes. Henry Louis Gates Jr. YouTube. 2020.

15. The ‘Casta System’
in Spanish America
• The English word “caste” comes from
Spanish/Portuguese “casta”, which
translates as “lineage.”
• Historians have debated whether racial
caste hierarchies were fixed of more fluid.
• Las Castas was a socio-legal institution
which categorized people into racial
categories, distinguishing between
Europeans, Indians, and Africans.
• This system also categorized mixed
people as “mulattos” and “mestizos.”

16. Slavery, Sex, and Marriage
European colonists in the Americas
were living among indigenous people
and enslaved Africans. Despite their
different backgrounds and social
statuses, they interacted socially and
sexually.
The colonial order required laws and
legal categories for these different
peoples, to distinguish between free
people and enslaved people, and
between “heathens” and Christians.

17. Marriage in the Virginia
Colony, 1607-1700
• The Virginia Company of London was formed to
both bring profit to its shareholders and to establish
an English colony in the New World.
• Prior to Virginia, the British had no colonies outside
of Europe (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, etc.).
• The first so-called “interracial” marriage was
between the Englishman John Rolfe and
Pocahontas, an Indigenous woman. Their wedding
was intended to create peace between the
Powhatan people and English settlers.
• Between 1620 and 1624, the Virginia Company
imported ninety single English women to Virginia.
They were auctioned off for marriage to English
colonists.
• The Virginia Company of London was formed to
both bring profit to its shareholders and to establish
an English colony in the New World.
• Prior to Virginia, the British had no colonies outside
of Europe (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, etc.).
• The first so-called “interracial” marriage was
between the Englishman John Rolfe and
Pocahontas, an Indigenous woman. Their wedding
was intended to create peace between the
Powhatan people and English settlers.
• Between 1620 and 1624, the Virginia Company
imported ninety single English women to Virginia.
They were auctioned off for marriage to English
colonists.

18. What Comes Naturally:
Miscegenation Law and the
Making of Race in America
(2009)
Peggy Pascoe (1954-2010) was
an American historian. She
received her PhD in History at
Stanford University, and taught
women’s history at the
University of Utah and the
University of Oregon.

19. “Racial Purity and
Interracial Sex in
the Law of Colonial
and Antebellum
Virginia” (1967)
Judge A. Leon Higginbotham (1928-1998) and
Barbara K. Kopytoff published this article in 1967 in
the Georgetown Law Journal.
Higginbotham was a U.S. District Court Judge.

20. Higginbotham and Kopytoff (1967): “There is probably no better place than Virginia to
examine the origins of the American doctrine of racial purity and the related prohibitions
on interracial sex and interracial marriage” (1967).
Higginbotham and Kopytoff (1967): “For more than three centuries, the Virginia courts and
legislatures advocated and endorsed concepts of racial purity that we would call racist”
(1968).
Higginbotham and Kopytoff (1967): “The laws regarding racial purity and interracial sex in
pre-Civil War Virginia sprang from two concerns. The first concern was with the
maintenance of clear racial boundary lines in a society that came to be based on racial
slavery. Starting in the late seventeenth century, white Virginians devised statutes to
discourage racial intermingling and then statutes to classify racially the mixed-race
children born when the earlier statutes were ineffective. The statutes punishing voluntary
interracial sex and marriage were directed only at whites; they alone were charged with the
responsibility for maintaining racial purity” (1968).
Higginbotham and Kopytoff (1967): “The second concern was with involuntary interracial
sex-that is, rape. This was seen primarily as an aspect of power relations between the
races. Virginia applied the early law of rape more harshly to blacks than to whites: it
punished only black men for interracial rape and, in the nineteenth century, the state
formulated anti-rape statutes directed specifically at blacks” (1968).

21. Virginian
Luxuries
Virginian Luxuries. c.1825. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/4334hpr-
5f67bd142f9f5f6/

22. “The Condition of the Mother”:
Race and Gender under Slavery
Higginbotham and Kopytoff (1967):
“In 1662, the House of Burgesses set down the law on the inheritance of slave status, and
it remained virtually unchanged throughout the slave period in Virginia.16 It was devised
to settle the status of the mulatto children of free white fathers and slave Negro mothers.
The act read:
Whereas some doubts have arrisen whether children got by any English- man
upon a negro woman should be slave or free. Be it therefore enacted and declared by this
present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shalbe held
bond or free only according to the condition of the mother .... 17
There was a confounding of "negro" and "slave" in this early statute. It stated that the
problem was the doubtful status of the mulatto children of "negro" women; yet "negro"
must have meant "slave" or there would have been no question of the slave or free status
of the children. In a world in which whites (here "Englishmen") were assumed to be free
and Negroes were increasingly assumed to be slaves, a decision had to be made about the
status of individuals who did not clearly belong to one race or the other: children whose
parents represented two distinct races and two extreme statuses” (1971).

23. How White is White? How Black is Black?:
The ‘Problem’ of Racial Mixture
Higginbotham and Kopytoff (1967): “In 1705, the Virginia legislature barred mulattoes,
along with Negroes, Indians, and criminals, from holding "any office, ecclesiasticall, civill or
mili- tary, or be[ing] in any place of public trust or power." The mixed-race individuals
defined as mulatto under the statute were "the child of an Indian, or the child, grandchild,
or great grandchild of a Negro.” Whites had distinct legal advantages, but mulattoes had no
greater rights than Negroes. Thus, the important dividing line was the white/mulatto
boundary, not the mulatto/black boundary. The fact that some people were classified as
mulatto rather than as Negro seems to have been simply a recognition of their visible
differences” (1977).
Higginbotham and Kopytoff (1967): “The Virginia legislature, meeting in 1785, changed the
legal definition of mulatto to those with "one-fourth part or more of negro blood."'49 Thus,
by implication, those of one-eighth Negro ancestry (one Negro great-grandparent), who by
the 1705 statute had been mulattoes, were now legally white. There is no mention in the
statute of Indian ancestry “ (1978).

24. Pascoe (2009): “America’s earliest laws against interracial sex and marriage were spawned by
slavery. The first such law, designed to prevent marriages between “freeborne English
women” and ‘Negro Slaues [sic],’ was passed in Maryland in 1664 as part of the act that
authorized lifelong slavery in that colony…” (19).
Pascoe (2009): “In 1662, Virginia legislators resolved ‘doubts [that had] arisen whether
children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or free’ by passing a
law that defined slavery as a condition inherited from mothers and prohibited fornication
between ‘any christian . . . with a negro man or woman.’ By 1691, Virginia legislators had
decided to prohibit marriage and bastardy between any ‘English or other white man or
woman” and any “negroe, mulatto, or Indian man or woman bond or free.’ Other colonies
soon followed. During the colonial period, laws against interracial marriage were passed in
the British colonies of Massachusetts (1705), North Carolina (1715), Pennsylvania (1726), and
Georgia (1750) and, by decree of Louis XV, in the French colony of Louisiana (1724)” (20).
Anti-Miscegenation Laws:
Following Virginia and Maryland’s Example

25. Unnatural Intimacy?
Pascoe (2009): “This book examines two of the most insidious ideas in American history. The
first is the belief that interracial marriage is unnatural. The second is the belief in white
supremacy. When these two ideas converged, with the invention of the term “miscegenation”
in the 1860s, the stage was set for the rise of a social, political, and legal system of white
supremacy that reigned through the 1960s and, many would say, beyond” (1).
Pascoe (2009): “The claim that interracial marriage was unnatural drew much of its power from
cultural assumptions about the nature of race, so much so that miscegenation law provides a
premier locus for studying the history of race in America” (2).
Pascoe (2009): “The term ‘miscegenation’ first appeared during the presidential election of
1864, in a pamphlet written by two New York politicos who wanted to replace the older term
for interracial sex and marriage, ‘amalgamation,’ which they considered inadequate because it
had been borrowed from some- thing else (the mixture of metals). Insisting that it was
important to have an independent term, one that referred to the “mixture of two or more
races” and nothing else, they combined miscere (mix) and genus (race) to form the new, more
scientific-sounding ‘miscegenation’” (1).

26. Source:
Smithsonian
Museum
“The Miscegenation
Ball” (1864).

27. “What Miscegenation
Is!”
“What We are to Expect Now
that Mr. Lincoln is Re-elected”
(1865).
By L. Seaman.

28. E. W. Clay, “Practical
Amalgamation” (1839)
Courtesy of the Library
Company of
Philadelphia

29. Danielle Bainbridge. PBS Origins. YouTube. 2018.

30. “Right-Wing Culture Warriors.” MSNBC. YouTube. 2024.