Ethnocentrism and proto-racism 's biblical curse on
Canaan, which was often misinterpreted as
a curse on his father Ham, was used to justify
slavery in 19th century America.
Aristotle Bernard Lewis has cited the
Greek philosopher Aristotle who, in his discussion of slavery, stated that while Greeks are free by nature, "
barbarians" (non-Greeks) are slaves by nature, in that it is in their nature to be more willing to submit to a
despotic government. While Aristotle makes remarks about the most natural slaves being those with strong bodies and slave souls (unfit for rule, unintelligent) which would seem to imply a physical basis for discrimination, he also explicitly states that the right kind of souls and bodies do not always go together, implying that the greatest determinate for inferiority and natural slaves versus natural masters is the soul, not the body. The modern version of racism based on the idea of
hereditary inferiority had not yet been developed, and Aristotle never explicitly stated whether he believed the supposed natural inferiority of Barbarians was caused by environment and climate (like many of his contemporaries) or by birth. Historian Dante A. Puzzo, in his discussion of Aristotle, racism, and the ancient world writes that: Racism rests on two basic assumptions: that a correlation exists between physical characteristics and moral qualities; that mankind is divisible into superior and inferior stocks. Racism, thus defined, is a modern conception, for prior to the XVIth century there was virtually nothing in the life and thought of the West that can be described as racist. To prevent misunderstanding a clear distinction must be made between racism and
ethnocentrism ... The Ancient
Hebrews, in referring to all who were not Hebrews as
Gentiles, were indulging in ethnocentrism, not in racism. ... So it was with the
Hellenes who denominated all non-Hellenes—whether the wild
Scythians or the
Egyptians whom they acknowledged as their mentors in the arts of
civilization—Barbarians, the term denoting that which was strange or foreign.
Early antisemitism Some scholars suggest that anti-Jewish policies under the
Hellenistic empires and the
Roman Empire constitute examples of ancient racism. Other scholars have criticized this view as based on an ahistorical conception of race, and argued that such policies were aimed at repressing a religious group resistant to imperialism and conformity rather than a racialized entity.
Medieval Arab writers Bernard Lewis has also cited historians and geographers of the
Middle East and North Africa region, including
Al-Muqaddasi,
Al-Jahiz,
Al-Masudi,
Abu Rayhan Biruni,
Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, and
Ibn Qutaybah.) and
Turkic peoples; and the influence of
Judeo-Christian ideas regarding divisions among humankind. By the eighth century, anti-black prejudice among Arabs resulted in discrimination. A number of medieval Arabic authors argued against this prejudice, urging respect for all black people and especially
Ethiopians. Notable Islamic
caliphs with Sub-Saharan ancestry include
Abu al-Misk Kafur Al-Mustansir Billah,
Yaqub al-Mansur,
Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Othman, Sultan of the
Marinid dynasty and
Moulay Ismail Ibn Sharif. By the 14th century, a significant number of slaves came from
sub-Saharan Africa; Lewis argues that this led to the likes of Egyptian historian Al-Abshibi (1388–1446) writing that "[i]t is said that when the [black] slave is sated, he fornicates, when he is hungry, he steals." According to Lewis, the 14th-century Tunisian scholar
Ibn Khaldun also wrote: ...beyond [known peoples of black West Africa] to the south there is no civilization in the proper sense. There are only humans who are closer to dumb animals than to rational beings. They live in thickets and caves, and eat herbs and unprepared grain. They frequently eat each other. They cannot be considered human beings. Therefore, the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because (Negroes) have little that is (essentially) human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals, as we have stated. According to
Wesleyan University professor Abdelmajid Hannoum, French
Orientalists projected racist and
colonialist views of the 19th century into their translations of medieval Arabic writings, including those of Ibn Khaldun. This resulted in the translated texts
racializing Arabs and
Berber people, when no such distinction was made in the originals. James E. Lindsay argues that the concept of an
Arab identity itself did not exist until modern times, though others like
Robert Hoyland have argued that a common sense of
Arab identity already existed by the 9th century.
Limpieza de sangre With the
Umayyad Caliphate's conquest of Hispania, Muslim Arabs and
Berbers overthrew the previous
Visigothic rulers and created
Al-Andalus, which contributed to the
Golden age of Jewish culture, and lasted for six centuries. It was followed by the centuries-long
Reconquista, during which Christian Iberian kingdoms contested Al-Andalus and progressively conquered the divided Muslim kingdoms, culminating in the
fall of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada in 1492 and the rise of
Ferdinand V and
Isabella I as
Catholic monarchs of Spain. The legacy Catholic
Spaniards then formulated the
limpieza de sangre ("cleanliness of blood") doctrine. It was during this time in history that the Western concept of aristocratic "
blue blood" emerged in a racialized, religious and feudal context, so as to stem the upward social mobility of the converted
New Christians. Robert Lacey explains: It was the Spaniards who gave the world the notion that an aristocrat's blood is not red but blue. The Spanish nobility started taking shape around the ninth century in classic military fashion, occupying land as warriors on horseback. They were to continue the process for more than five hundred years, clawing back sections of the peninsula from its Moorish occupiers, and a nobleman demonstrated his pedigree by holding up his sword arm to display the filigree of blue-blooded veins beneath his pale skin—proof that his birth had not been contaminated by the dark-skinned enemy. Sangre azul, blue blood, was thus a euphemism for being a
white man—Spain's own particular reminder that the refined footsteps of the aristocracy through history carry the rather less refined spoor of racism. Following the expulsion of the Arabic
Moors and most of the
Sephardic Jews from the
Iberian peninsula, the remaining
Jews and
Muslims were forced to
convert to Roman Catholicism, becoming "
New Christians", who were sometimes discriminated against by the "
Old Christians" in some cities (including
Toledo), despite condemnations by the Church and the State, which both welcomed the new flock. The remnants of such legislation persevered into the 19th century in military contexts. In
Portugal, the legal distinction between New and Old Christian was only ended through a legal decree issued by the
Marquis of Pombal in 1772, almost three centuries after the implementation of the racist discrimination. The
limpieza de sangre legislation was common also during the
colonization of the Americas, where it led to the racial and feudal separation of peoples and social strata in the colonies. It was however often ignored in practice, as the new colonies needed skilled people.
Theodor de Bry for
Las Casas's
Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, depicting Spanish atrocities during the
conquest of Cuba At the end of the
Renaissance, the
Valladolid debate (1550–1551), concerning the treatment of the
natives of the "
New World" pitted the Dominican friar and Bishop of Chiapas,
Bartolomé de Las Casas, to another Dominican and Humanist
philosopher,
Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. The latter argued that the
Indians practiced
human sacrifice of innocents,
cannibalism, and other such "crimes against nature"; they were unacceptable and should be suppressed by any means possible including war, thus reducing them to slavery or serfdom was in accordance with Catholic theology and
natural law. To the contrary, Bartolomé de Las Casas argued that the Amerindians were free men in the natural order and deserved the same treatment as others, according to
Catholic theology. It was one of the many controversies concerning racism, slavery, religion, and European morality that would arise in the following centuries and which resulted in the legislation protecting the natives. The marriage between Luisa de Abrego, a free black domestic servant from Seville and Miguel Rodríguez, a white segovian conquistador in 1565 in St. Augustine (Spanish Florida), is the first known and recorded Christian marriage anywhere in the continental United States. In the Spanish colonies, Spaniards developed a complex
caste system based on race, which was used for social control, and which also determined a person's importance in society. While many Latin American countries have long since rendered the system officially illegal through legislation, usually at the time of their independence,
prejudice based on degrees of perceived racial distance from European ancestry combined with one's socioeconomic status remain, an echo of the colonial caste system.
Racism as a modern phenomenon Racism is frequently described as a
modern phenomenon. In the view of the French philosopher and historian
Michel Foucault, the first formulation of racism emerged in the
Early Modern period as the "
discourse of race struggle", and a historical and political discourse, which Foucault opposed to the philosophical and juridical discourse of
sovereignty. This European discourse, which first appeared in
Great Britain, was then carried on in
France by such people as
Boulainvilliers (1658–1722),
Nicolas Fréret (1688–1749), and then, during the 1789
French Revolution,
Sieyès, and afterwards,
Augustin Thierry and
Cournot. Boulainvilliers, who created the matrix of such racist discourse in France, conceived of the "race" as being something closer to the sense of a "nation", that is, in his time, the "race" meant the "people". He conceived of France as being divided between various nations—the unified
nation-state is an
anachronism here—which themselves formed different "races". Boulainvilliers opposed the
absolute monarchy, which tried to bypass the
aristocracy by establishing a direct relationship to the
Third Estate. Thus, he developed the theory that the French aristocrats were the descendants of foreign invaders, whom he called the "
Franks", while according to him, the Third Estate constituted the autochthonous, vanquished
Gallo-Romans, who were dominated by the Frankish aristocracy as a consequence of the
right of conquest. Early modern racism was opposed to nationalism and the nation-state: the
Comte de Montlosier, in exile during the
French Revolution, who borrowed Boulainvilliers' discourse on the "Nordic race" as being the French aristocracy that invaded the plebeian "Gauls", thus showed his contempt for the Third Estate, calling it "this new people born of slaves ...
mixture of all races and of all times".
19th century Caption reads, "Matchless for the complexion..." Illustration of 'before and after' use of soap by black child in the bath; soap washes off his dark complexion. While 19th-century racism became closely intertwined with nationalism, leading to the
ethnic nationalist discourse that identified the "race" with the "
folk", leading to such movements as
pan-Germanism,
pan-Turkism,
pan-Arabism, and
pan-Slavism, medieval racism precisely divided the nation into various non-biological "races", which were thought to be the consequence of historical conquests and
social conflicts. Michel Foucault traced the genealogy of modern racism to this medieval "historical and political discourse of race struggle". According to him, it divided itself in the 19th century according to two rival lines: on one hand, it was incorporated by racists, biologists and
eugenicists, who gave it the modern sense of "race", and they also transformed this popular discourse into a "
state racism" (e.g., Nazism). On the other hand,
Marxism also seized this discourse founded on the assumption of a political struggle that provided the real
engine of history and continued to act underneath the apparent peace. Thus, Marxists transformed the
essentialist notion of "race" into the historical notion of "
class struggle", defined by socially structured positions: capitalist or proletarian. In
The Will to Knowledge (1976), Foucault analyzed another opponent of the "race struggle" discourse:
Sigmund Freud's
psychoanalysis, which opposed the concept of "blood
heredity", prevalent in the 19th century racist discourse. Authors such as
Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 book
The Origins of Totalitarianism, have said that the racist ideology (
popular racism) which developed at the end of the 19th century helped legitimize the
imperialist conquests of foreign territories and the atrocities that sometimes accompanied them (such as the
Herero and Nama genocide of 1904–1908 or the
Armenian genocide of 1915–1917).
Rudyard Kipling's poem, ''
The White Man's Burden'' (1899), is one of the more famous illustrations of the belief in the inherent superiority of the
European culture over the rest of the world, though it is also thought to be a satirical appraisal of such imperialism. Racist ideology thus helped legitimize the conquest and incorporation of foreign territories into an empire, which were regarded as a humanitarian obligation partially as a result of these racist beliefs. " and "Negro" features in contrast to the "higher" "Anglo-Teutonic". However, during the 19th century, Western European colonial powers were involved in the suppression of the
Arab slave trade in Africa, as well as in the suppression of the
slave trade in West Africa. Some Europeans during the time period objected to injustices that occurred in some colonies and lobbied on behalf of
aboriginal peoples. Thus, when the
Hottentot Venus was displayed in England in the beginning of the 19th century, the African Association publicly opposed itself to the exhibition. The same year that Kipling published his poem,
Joseph Conrad published
Heart of Darkness (1899), a clear criticism of the
Congo Free State, which was owned by
Leopold II of Belgium. Examples of racial theories used include the creation of the
Hamitic theory during the
European exploration of Africa. The term
Hamite was applied to different populations within North Africa, mainly comprising Ethiopians,
Eritreans,
Somalis,
Berbers, and the ancient Egyptians. Hamites were regarded as Caucasoid peoples who probably originated in either Arabia or Asia on the basis of their cultural, physical and linguistic similarities with the peoples of those areas. Europeans considered Hamites to be more civilized than
Sub-Saharan Africans, and more akin to themselves and
Semitic peoples. In the first two-thirds of the 20th century, the Hamitic race was, in fact, considered one of the branches of the
Caucasian race, along with the
Indo-Europeans,
Semites, and the
Mediterraneans. However, the Hamitic peoples themselves were often deemed to have failed as rulers, which was usually ascribed to
interbreeding with
Negroes. In the mid-20th century, the German scholar
Carl Meinhof (1857–1944) claimed that the
Bantu race was formed by a merger of
Hamitic and
Negro races. The Hottentots (
Nama or
Khoi) were formed by the merger of Hamitic and
Bushmen (San) races—both being termed nowadays as
Khoisan peoples. on the issue of black suffrage, issued during the
Pennsylvania gubernatorial election of 1866 In the United States in the early 19th century, the
American Colonization Society was established as the primary vehicle for proposals to return black Americans to greater freedom and equality in Africa. The colonization effort resulted from a mixture of motives with its founder
Henry Clay stating that "unconquerable prejudice resulting from their color, they never could amalgamate with the free whites of this country. It was desirable, therefore, as it respected them, and the residue of the population of the country, to drain them off". Racism spread throughout the New World in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
Whitecapping, which started in Indiana in the late 19th century, soon spread throughout all of North America, causing many African laborers to flee from the land they worked on. In the US, during the 1860s, racist posters were used during election campaigns. In one of these racist posters (see above), a black man is depicted lounging idly in the foreground as one white man ploughs his field and another chops wood. Accompanying labels are: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread", and "The white man must work to keep his children and pay his taxes." The black man wonders, "Whar is de use for me to work as long as dey make dese appropriations." Above in a cloud is an image of the "Freedman's Bureau! Negro Estimate of Freedom!" The bureau is pictured as a large domed building resembling the U.S. Capitol and is inscribed "Freedom and No Work". Its columns and walls are labeled, "Candy", "Rum, Gin, Whiskey", "Sugar Plums", "Indolence", "White Women", "Apathy", "White Sugar", "Idleness", and so on. On 5 June 1873, Sir
Francis Galton, distinguished English explorer and cousin of Charles Darwin, wrote in a letter to
The Times:
20th century 's list of the Jewish population in Europe, drafted for the
Wannsee Conference, held to ensure the cooperation of various levels of the Nazi government in the
Final Solution The Nazi party, which seized power in the
1933 German elections and maintained a dictatorship over much of Europe until the
End of World War II on the European continent, deemed the Germans to be part of an Aryan "
master race" (
Herrenvolk), who therefore had the right to expand their territory and enslave or kill members of other races deemed inferior.
Adolf Hitler's 1925 memoir
Mein Kampf was full of admiration for America's treatment of "
coloreds". Nazi praise for America's institutional racism was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and Nazi lawyers were advocates of the use of American models. Race-based U.S. citizenship laws and
anti-miscegenation laws (no race mixing) directly inspired the Nazi's two principal
Nuremberg racial laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. In 1928, Hitler praised Americans for having "gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keeps the modest remnant under observation in a cage." On Nazi Germany's expansion eastward, in 1941 Hitler stated, "Our
Mississippi [the line beyond which Thomas Jefferson wanted all Indians expelled] must be the
Volga." Nazi policies labeled
Romani people,
people of color, and
Slavs (mainly
Poles,
Serbs,
Russians,
Belarusians,
Ukrainians and
Czechs) as inferior non-Aryan subhumans. In accordance with Nazi racial ideology, approximately six million Jews were killed in the
Holocaust. 2.5 million
ethnic Poles, 0.5 million
ethnic Serbs and 0.2–0.5 million
Romani were killed by the regime and its collaborators. The Nazis considered most
Slavs to be non-Aryan
Untermenschen. The Nazi Party's chief racial theorist,
Alfred Rosenberg, adopted the term from
Klansman Lothrop Stoddard's 1922 book
The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man. In the secret plan ("Master Plan East") the Nazis resolved to expel, enslave, or exterminate most Slavic people to provide "
living space" for Germans, but Nazi policy towards Slavs changed during World War II due to manpower shortages which necessitated limited Slavic participation in the
Waffen-SS. Significant war crimes were committed against Slavs, particularly
Poles, and
Soviet POWs had a far higher mortality rate than their American and British counterparts due to deliberate neglect and mistreatment. Between June 1941 and January 1942, the Nazis killed an estimated 2.8 million
Red Army POWs, whom they viewed as "subhuman". In the years 1943–1945, around 120,000 Polish people, mostly women and children, became the victims of
ethnicity-based massacres by the
Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which was then operating in the territory of
occupied Poland. In addition to Poles who represented the vast majority of the murdered people, the victims also included Jews, Armenians, Russians, and Ukrainians who were married to Poles or attempted to help them. During the intensification of ties with Nazi Germany in the 1930s,
Ante Pavelić and the
Ustaše and their idea of the
Croatian nation became increasingly race-oriented. The Ustaše view of national and racial identity, as well as the theory of
Serbs as an inferior race, was influenced by
Croatian nationalists and intellectuals from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Serbs were primary targets of racial laws and murders in the puppet
Independent State of Croatia (NDH); Jews and Roma were also targeted. The Ustaše introduced laws to strip Serbs of their citizenship, livelihoods, and possessions. During the
genocide in the NDH, Serbs suffered among the highest casualty rates in Europe during the World War II, and the NDH was one of the most lethal regimes in the 20th century. Initially passing the training courses with outstanding scores, the group faced overt discrimination from by the US navy and were forced to resit their exams due to pervasive racism. White supremacy was dominant in the U.S. from its founding up to the
civil rights movement. On the U.S. immigration laws prior to 1965, sociologist Stephen Klineberg cited the law as clearly declaring "that
Northern Europeans are a superior subspecies of the white race." The
Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U.S. citizenship to whites only, and in the 1923 case,
United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, the Supreme Court ruled that high caste Hindus were not "white persons" and were therefore racially ineligible for naturalized citizenship. It was after the
Luce–Celler Act of 1946 that a quota of 100 Indians per year could immigrate to the U.S. and become citizens. The
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 dramatically opened entry to the U.S. to immigrants other than traditional Northern European and
Germanic groups, and as a result would significantly alter the demographic mix in the U.S. Serious
race riots in Durban between
Indians and
Zulus erupted in 1949.
Ne Win's rise to power in Burma in 1962 and his relentless persecution of "resident aliens" led to an exodus of some 300,000
Burmese Indians. They migrated to escape
racial discrimination and wholesale nationalisation of private enterprises a few years later, in 1964. The
Zanzibar Revolution of 12 January 1964, put an end to the local
Arab dynasty. Thousands of Arabs and Indians in Zanzibar were massacred in riots, and thousands more were detained or fled the island. In August 1972, Ugandan President
Idi Amin started the expropriation of properties owned by Asians and Europeans. In the same year, Amin ethnically cleansed
Uganda's Asians, giving them 90 days to leave the country. Shortly after World War II, the South African
National Party took control of the government in South Africa. Between 1948 and 1994, the
apartheid regime took place. This regime based its ideology on the racial separation of whites and non-whites, including the unequal rights of non-whites. Several protests and violence occurred during the
struggle against apartheid, the most famous of these include the
Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, the
Soweto uprising in 1976, the
Church Street bombing of 1983, and the
Cape Town peace march of 1989.
Contemporary , the youth leader of South Africa's ruling
ANC, was found guilty of hate speech for singing "
Shoot the Boer" at a number of public events. During the
Congo Civil War (1998–2003),
Pygmy people were hunted down like game animals and eaten. Both sides in the war regarded them as "subhuman" and some say their flesh can confer magical powers. UN human rights activists reported in 2003 that rebels had carried out acts of
cannibalism. Sinafasi Makelo, a representative of the
Mbuti pygmies, has asked the
UN Security Council to recognise cannibalism as both a
crime against humanity and an act of
genocide. A report released by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination condemns
Botswana's treatment of the '
Bushmen' as racist. In 2008, the tribunal of the 15-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC) accused Zimbabwean President
Robert Mugabe of having a racist attitude towards white people. The
mass demonstrations and riots against African students in
Nanjing, China, lasted from December 1988 to January 1989. In November 2009, British newspaper
The Guardian reported that
Lou Jing, of mixed Chinese and African parentage, had emerged as the most famous talent show contestant in China and has become the subject of intense debate because of her skin color. Her attention in the media opened serious debates about
racism in China and racial prejudice. Some 70,000 black African Mauritanians were expelled from Mauritania in the late 1980s. In the Sudan, black African captives in the civil war were often
enslaved, and female prisoners were often sexually abused. The
Darfur conflict has been described by some as a racial matter. In October 2006, Niger announced that it would deport the approximately 150,000 Arabs living in the
Diffa region of eastern Niger to Chad. While the government collected Arabs in preparation for the
deportation, two girls died, reportedly after fleeing Government forces, and three women suffered miscarriages. , May 2000 The
Jakarta riots of May 1998 targeted many
Chinese Indonesians. The
anti-Chinese legislation was in the Indonesian constitution until 1998. Resentment against
Chinese workers has led to violent confrontations in Africa and Oceania. Anti-Chinese rioting, involving tens of thousands of people, broke out in
Papua New Guinea in May 2009.
Indo-Fijians suffered violent attacks after the
Fiji coup in 2000. Non-indigenous citizens of Fiji are subject to discrimination. Racial divisions also exist in Guyana, Malaysia, Trinidad and Tobago, Madagascar, and South Africa. In Malaysia such racist state policies are codified on many levels, see
Bumiputera. Peter Bouckaert, the
Human Rights Watch's emergencies director, said in an interview that "racist hatred" is the chief motivation behind the
violence against Rohingya Muslims in
Myanmar. One form of racism in the United States was enforced
racial segregation, which existed until the 1960s, when it was outlawed in the
Civil Rights Act of 1964. It has been argued that this separation of races continues to exist
de facto today in different forms, such as lack of access to loans and resources or discrimination by police and other government officials. The 2016
Pew Research poll found that Italians, in particular, hold strong
anti-Romani views, with 82% of Italians expressing negative opinions about
Romani. In Greece, there are 67%, in Hungary, 64%, in France, 61%, in Spain, 49%, in Poland, 47%, in the UK, 45%, in Sweden, 42%, in Germany, 40%, and in the Netherlands, 37%, that have an unfavourable view of Roma. A survey conducted by
Harvard University found the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine had the strongest racial bias against black people in Europe, while Serbia, Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina had the weakest racial bias, followed by Croatia and Ireland. A 2023
University of Cambridge survey which featured the largest sample of Black people in Britain found that 88% had reported racial discrimination at work, 79% believed the police unfairly targeted black people with
stop and search powers and 80% definitely or somewhat agreed that the biggest barrier to academic attainment for young Black students was
racial discrimination in education. ==Scientific racism==