Images of race / edited with an introduction by Michael D. Biddiss.

Date:
1979
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Images of race / edited with an introduction by Michael D. Biddiss. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    34/268 (page 30)
    30 IMAGES OF RACE generations of English misrule than from his innate unfitness to enjoy the full fruits of higher civilization. The result was sometimes startlingly harsh. All racial stereotyp¬ ing, by its very nature, must strip its victims of individuality. Yet it also nuis, at the very least, the risk of proceeding from such depersonalization to a still more alarming dehumanization. Here perhaps the most striking feature of contemporary conmient on the Irish was a constant hinting at their resemblance to the ape, whose relevance to racial debate had been so suddenly accentuated by the controversy surrounding Darwin. In 1860, during a visit to Sligo, Kingsley wrote as follows: 'I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. ... To see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much.'' Thus might a white man and a non-white one be together threatened with the loss of their full measure of human dignity. Today it is easy for us, who live beyond the epoch of Auschwitz, to appreciate readily the ultimately dehumanizing logic implicit in Kingsley's remark. Precisely for this reason, we need to recognize all the more clearly that this was not the conclusion at which he himself aimed.' The Rector of Eversley could believe, without conscious hypocrisy, that the Negro's lowliness in nature did not detract from a still deeper equality with all other men, inside the scheme of Christian redemption. Certainly that (jualification offered in this life little besides cold comfort to the Blacks of Morant Bay, yet it does remain essential to any truly historical understanding of Kingsley's overall attitude. In the study of nineteenth-century racial ideas at large, broadly similar reservations have repeatedly to be made. It seems, for instance, that the disparagement of alien stocks sometimes began as a mere incidental to the vaunting of (|uality in the writer's own breed, with little thought about the harsher implications of such distinction. In short, we must avoid remoulding nineteenth-century images of race merely to make them conform better with the categories of a later era. The mid-Victorians were indeed perplexed about tlie nature and significance of human diversity, and about the relationship between heredity and environment. Yet, as we have good cause still to know, these are genuinely complicated issues. Mid-Victorian approaches to them were marked more frequently by honest confusion than by