... having been breathed out

For English travel writer George Best, climate theory fell apart when he saw on an Arctic voyage in 1577 that the Inuit people in northeastern Canada were darker than the people living in the hotter south. In a 1578 account of the expedition, Best shied away from climate theory in explaining "the Ethiopians blacknesse." He found an alternative: "holy Scripture," or the curse theory that had recently been articulated by a Dominican Friar in Peru and a handful of French intellectuals, a theory more enticing to slaveholders. In Best's whimsical interpretation of Genesis, Noah orders his White and "Angelike" sons to abstain from sex with their wives on the Ark, and then tells them that the first child born after the flood would inherit the earth. When the evil, tyrannical, and hypersexual Ham has sex on the Ark, God wills that Ham's descendants shall be "so blacke and loathesome," in Best's telling, "that it might remain a spectacle of disobedience to all the worlde."

The first major debate between racists had invaded the English discourse. This argument about the cause of inferior Blackness—curse or climate, nature or nurture—would rage for decades, and eventually influence settlers to America. Curse theorists were the first known segregationists. They believed that Black people were naturally and permanently inferior, and totally incapable of becoming White. Climate theorists were the first known assimilationists, believing Black people had been nurtured by the hot sun into a temporary inferiority, but were capable of becoming White if they moved to a cooler climate.

George Best produced his curse theory in 1578, in the era between Henry VII and Oliver Cromwell, a time during which the English nation was experiencing the snowballing, conflicting passions of overseas adventure and domestic control, or, to use historian Winthrop Jordan's words, of "voyages of discovery overseas" and "inward voyages of discovery." The mercantile expansion abroad, the progressively commercialized economy at home, the fabulous profits, the exciting adventure stories, and the class warfare all destabilized the social order in Elizabethan England, a social order being intensely scrutinized by the rising congregation of morally strict, hyper-dictating, pious Puritans.

George Best used Africans as "social mirrors," to use Jordan's phrase, for the hypersexuality, greed, and lack of discipline—the Devil's machinations—that he "found first" in England "but could not speak of." Normalizing negative behavior in faraway African people allowed writers to de-normalize negative behavior in White people, to de-normalize what they witnessed during intense appraisals of self and nation.

—Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

I find this whole passage fascinating, but particularly the construction of Whiteness in politically tumultuous Elizabethan England, and the othering of Africans as a way for White folks to distance themselves from behaviors uncomfortably observed at home.