Prometheus 6   

Today, historians and social scientists in the Western world have reached the conclusion that the concept of "race" is a modern idea; it did not exist before the 17th century and came into fruition gradually during the 18th century. Despite wide physical variation among populations of the Ancient World, centering on the Mediterranean and Middle East, none of the peoples there divided their populations into distinct and exclusive groups called races.

In the U.S., race ideology, as a body of beliefs and attitudes about human differences, evolved in the wake of the establishment of slavery only for Africans and their descendants. The invention of race was primarily a product of efforts to justify slavery and the continuing conquest and exploitation of Native Americans on the basis of "natural" difference and inferiority. Race from its beginning was a mechanism denoting social ranking and inequality of human groups.

Race came into the American consciousness as a way of expressing social distinctions in a population with considerable physical variation. Skin color, hair texture, nose shape and size, and eye shape, were some of the features Americans used as markers of race status in the 18th century. When Chinese and Japanese immigrants began to arrive in North America in the 19th century, their physical features also became interpreted as evidence of an inferior race status.

During the late 19th and 20th centuries, racial ideology spread and was incorporated into the cultures of many other nations, particularly where there existed some form of continuing inter-ethnic, or inter-group conflict. The process of racialization of an out-group even spread into areas where large physical differences were absent (e.g., Japanese racialization of Koreans).

Racism exists when one ethnic group or historical collectivity dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate another on the basis of differences that it believes are hereditary and unalterable. An ideological basis for explicit racism came to a unique fruition in the West during modern times.

During the Renaissance and Reformation, the official rationale for enslaving Africans was that they were heathens: non-Christian. But when Virginia decreed in 1667 that converted slaves could be kept in bondage not because they were actual heathens but because they had heathen ancestry, the justification for Black servitude changed from religious status to something approaching race.

During the Enlightenment, 18th-century ethnologists began to think of humans as part of the natural world, subdivided into three to five varieties of a single human species. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, an increasing number of writers, especially those committed to the defense of slavery, maintained that the races were separate species. After emancipation, racism was intensified rather than diminished. In particular, social Darwinism helped foster a new and more credible scientific racism that remained respectable and influential in the U.S. and Europe until World War II.

Hitler, it has been said, gave racism a bad name. People's moral revulsion against the extremes of Nazi Germany, reinforced by new scientific discoveries, served to finally discredit overt scientific racism. Biological racism, however, is not a thing of the past. Discrimination by institutions and individuals against those perceived as racially different can long persist and even flourish under the illusion of non-racism, as historians of Brazil have recently discovered. The use of allegedly deep-seated cultural differences to justify hostility and discrimination against newcomers from the Third World in several European countries has led to allegations of a new "cultural racism."

Historically, people may have defined those who were different from themselves as what some have termed the Other, but it wasn't rooted in physical diffference, and wasn't the same as our notions of race today. Modern racism came into existence to justify slavery as an institution in North America.

American slavery is distinctive because it is the first system based on race, or innate difference. In many parts of the world, those captured in battle were often enslaved. Anyone could be enslaved if they were on the losing side. But only in America do you get this special category of human bondage. Ironically, that's because we are the first to propose that man has God-given natural rights.

There's a moral contradiction between espousing the lofty ideal of equality and having slaves form the foundation of your economy. To avoid looking like a hypocrite, you come up with a story that says, "There's something different about these people. This whole business of inalienable rights is fine, but it doesn't apply to everyone." Once you recognize the necessity of trying to justify slavery in the land of freedom, you start to build a case specifically geared to tell the world that these people are different.

But that means when slavery is over, the rationale remains. And it takes on new incarnations. The most destructive part of the American experience is the rationalization of this special category of human bondage. Although slavery is long gone, the rationale continues to divide us and makes it difficult for us to be the kind of nation that we really want to be, and ought to be.