17世纪盎格鲁美洲奴役观的演化与种族主义的兴起

The Evolution of the Idea of Slavery in Anglo-America and the Rise of Racism in the 17 th Century

盎格鲁美洲种族主义的兴起,肇始于基督教精英对传播福音的坚持和美洲奴隶主对财产权的捍卫所引发的冲突。最初,殖民者以宗教界限建构了自由人和奴隶的社会等级。对于殖民者来说,黑人奴隶是与基督徒对立存在的异教徒,异教身份是他们遭受奴役的认知依据。然而,受洗现象的出现改变了黑人奴隶的宗教身份,它使殖民者无法从观念上确认奴隶制度的正当性。为维护异教奴役观形塑的身份边界,奴隶主坚决反对黑奴受洗。奴隶主的这一立场违背了基督教福音主义原则,因此受到基督教精英和英帝国政府的批驳。17世纪80年代,殖民地立法机构为规避因受洗问题引发的两难困境,引入了“白人”概念,将“肤色”确认为自由与奴役的绝对边界。这一转变意味着奴役黑人的依据从宗教身份转向了肤色差异,种族主义奴役观由此勃兴。而种族主义从奴隶制中派生后,又依托肤色界限在自由人社会中塑造了白人与黑人的等级之别。此后,不同形式的绝对边界与社会等级相结合,为绵延数百年的种族主义顽疾埋下了病根。

The rise of racism in Anglo-America began as a conflict between the insistence of the Christian elites on spreading the gospel and the defence of property rights by the American slaveholders.Initially,colonisers constructed a social hierarchy of freemen and slaves along religious lines.For the colonisers,black slaves were heathens as opposed to Christians,and heathenish identity was the perceived basis of their enslavement.However,the emergence of the baptism changed the religious identity of black slaves,and it prevented colonisers from conceptually justifying slavery.In order to preserve the previous boundaries of slavery,slaveholders were adamantly opposed to the baptism of black slaves.That attitude of slaveholders was contrary to the principles of the Christian evangelicalism and was therefore rejected by both the Christian elite and the British imperial government.The concept of‘the white'was introduced by the colonial legislature in the 1680s to circumvent the dilemma of the baptism by recognising‘the skin colour'as the absolute boundary between freedom and slavery.This meant that the basis of enslaving the blacks shifted from religious identity to the skin colour,and a racist idea of slavery emerged.Derived from slavery,racism in turn relied on the boundary of the skin colour to shape the hierarchical distinction between the whites and the blacks in a society of freedom.Afterwards,the combination of different forms of absolute boundaries and social hierarchies has laid the foundation for the persistence of racism over centuries.