From “Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America” by Joel Edward Goza
As Benjamin Issac explores in his remarkable work The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, the West’s addiction to myths of human superiority and inferiority extends all the way back to the ancient Greeks, who also crafted rationalizations to justify slavery and inequality. Jefferson was intimate with these myths and their most famous Greek promoters: Plato and Aristotle.
In the Republic, Plato imagines “a noble lie” to indoctrinate citizens to believe that some Athenians are created by gold, some silver, and others iron to protect class distinctions in a democratic society. This laid the groundwork to argue for a human hierarchy. Aristotle went on to imagine slavery as an institution that was mutually beneficial for the enslaver and the enslaved and went further still by imagining slaves as animals. Jefferson was intimate with such stories and logic, and they informed his understanding of how to promote deeply entrenched racial distinctions in a society defined by democratic ideals.
But Jefferson’s thinking was also shaped by the racial ideologies of the Enlightenment. When the philosophers of the Enlightenment examined the Greek myths and rationalizations that justified class segregation and slavery, they proved inspirational. The Greek philosophies and mythologies of inherent superiority and inferiority needed to evolve from a hierarchy completely unrelated to the color of skin and physical features to a worldview obsessed with the physical distinctions between Europeans and non-Europeans. And, of course, the primary target was repeatedly the physical distinctions of Africans. Thus, when the Enlightenment philosophers seized the Greeks’ myths that undergirded their conceptions of a human hierarchy, they radicalized the myths by racializing them. The myths proved a powerful weapon in the colonial tool belt.