| Chapter 1: | Reconsiderations of Race, Ethnicity, and Identity: Transnational Migrants in Post–World War II Global Society |
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This unfamiliarity, and differences in their cultures, were seen by whites as signs not only of black inferiority but immorality as well. The forces of Christendom, capitalism, and colonization justified the assumed superiority of Europeans and natural inferiority of all others. Whites needed to guide theinferior colored peoples in their domains. This view eventually led to a polygenesis theory of human origins, based on skin color. As a result, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries even free blacks in the United States were denied basic human rights (and prohibited, for example, from voting). In America, skin-color-based human categorization became established and institutionalized—and the classificatory scheme came to be influenced by political, economic, social, and cultural sanctions.
By the nineteenth century, regardless of the teachings of the Bible, Europeans and Americans came to believe that different racial typesrepresented different peoples, all deriving from different ancestors. Wade (1997) argues that even though in this period the abolitionist movement began on humanitarian grounds, people still believed whites and colored people were biologically different. As a result, attempts to “whiten” populations became accepted throughout Europe and the Americas in the late nineteenth century. Since colored people were inferior, people should try to eliminate such physical traits. Thus, Europeans sought to prohibit not only the importation of slaves from Africa to their domains but also their reproduction on their soils. The Brazilian government and plantation owners, then, hesitated accepting colored migrants to fulfill the labor shortage on their coffee plantations. This movement influenced Japanese migration to Brazil, with them only first arriving in 1908 (compared to European migratory workers coming since the mid-1800s) (Adachi 2006).
Smedley (2007) argues that in the nineteenth century “science”—using techniques of measuring various aspects of the human body—sought to affirm the differences between blacks and whites and to justify the retention of phenotypically based separate human groups. In the twentieth-century, race scientists turned to IQ tests—which were heavily influenced by European and European American morals, culture, education,