Whiteness Concerns, circa 1578

In 1578, George Best, who had accompanied Martin Frobisher on his attempt to find the Northwest Passage, wrote True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discoverie. In there, he assures the English that America will not destroy their whiteness, as they desperately feared:

"Thus you see, that the cause of the Ethiopians blacknesse is the curse and natural infections of bloud, and not the distemperature of the clymate. We may therefore very well be assured, that under the Equinoxiall [Equator] is the most pleasant and delectable place of the world to dwell in."

I love that as early as 1578, the English are already using tortured logic to justify racism and colonialism while freaking out over their own whiteness.

You just can't make these things up.

From Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World, 85.