Francis Bacon Explains Black People
Francis Bacon would occasionally see black people in 17th-century London where “Aethiopian” novelty had made them a staple of Elizabethan court life, and, as their numbers increased, the question of why their skin was black and his white began to weigh on him. Bacon’s hunch was that it had something to do with the sun, and in 1620, he proposed an experiment. If you moved all the people from England to Ethiopia, the heat would turn their white skin black. Conversely, if you moved everyone from Ethiopia to England, a few centuries would find the population transformed into ruddy-cheeked, fair-haired Englanders. It’s a far-fetched idea, for sure, but also profoundly humanistic.
The experiment presumes that race is not an essential part of one’s humanity but rather an incidental effect of external influences. For Bacon, there wasn’t any essential difference between himself and the black people he constantly bumped into at Richmond Palace. They simply got more sun than he did. He wasn’t the only English Renaissance man to think along these lines. Sir Thomas Brown would propose a similar experiment in 1646 as would Robert Boyle in 1660. It was a popular idea that fell out of fashion not because of some major advances in genetics (Linnaeus and Blumenbach came much later) but because of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. European businessmen stood to make a lot of money selling and exploiting Africans, and so it was that the flimsy moralities of the slave traders and their customers required that black people lose their status as human beings and become a different species altogether.
Bigotry has always existed, and, as far as moral failings go, is relatively easy to overcome. Simply expose the bigot to the object of their prejudice, and, soon, they will see the error of their ways and amend them. Racism (with a capital R) is a different and much more difficult evil to eradicate, especially the Racism that arose in Europe and the Americas after slavery. This is because it does not have its roots in our natural fear of difference but in greed.