Black Folk Here and There

St. Clair Drake, author of Black Folk Here and There (1987), was a professor at Stanford university where he taught anthropology and sociology and directed the African and Afro American studies program.  Drake's book builds on Black Folk Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race (1941) by W. E. B. Du Bois.

In my review of Drake's book, I summarize:  In the Christian church prior to the sixteenth century, there was a mixed message regarding blacks.  There was some prejudice, but at the same time there were favorable stereotypes of Black people.  There was no systematic, institutionalized racism against Blacks at this time.  Soon the situation would change because "the sixteenth century was a watershed in race relations."

"The rise of the transatlantic trade in African men and women condemned to be enslaved on New World plantations meant that the system of multi-racial slavery, the norm in the Mediterranean, gave way to racial slavery in the Americas.  A doctrine of White Racism was gradually elaborated to defend this practice as well as European colonial imperialism.  This was a conscious and deliberate process of degrading Africans for economic and political ends."

Afro Americans have been degraded and dehumanized for so long in these United States that someone needed to set the record straight.  Drake has done so with thorough and balanced scholarship.

However, his analysis needs to be put into a larger context.  White racism against Blacks is historically a recent phenomenon.  Ethnocentrism, a cousin to racism, is both an ancient and widespread phenomenon.  Ethnocentrism is based on supposed cultural and/or national and/or religious superiority; often culture, nationality, and religion are mixed together as with the Christian Afrikaners in South Africa.

The ancient Greeks were highly ethnocentric; non-Greeks were regarded as barbarians.  The ancient Chinese were also highly ethnocentric as are modern Americans and modern Japanese.