Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

Immanuel Kant, for example, wrote that the “race of the whites contains all talents and motives in itself.” Black Africans, in contrast, “can be educated, but only to the education of servants” or, in other words, “they can be trained.” Native Americans were, according to Kant, “uneducable” and “lazy,” which might have served to soften European guilt for colonizing their continent and literally decimating them. Curtin points out that immunity to infectious diseases was a major factor in these stereotypes. The idea that Black people are well suited to a life of hard labor was influenced by African immigrants’ apparently unique ability to survive on the plantations in tropical regions of the Americas. In contrast, Native Americans were seen as a “weak race” because they often died after their first encounters with “white people.”