There is a good deal of research on the history of European powers in the 15th Century, specifically the Portuguese, creating the ideas of race predicated upon skin color, and the modern hierarchy of race in which societal power and status correlates to lightness of skin tone. When we talk about Black people or White people or East Asians, we are using language and a worldview that springs from the beginning of modern Colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Biologically, there is no such thing as race, and the categories we create to contain people around race are a social construct.
This isn't to say that there hasn't been ethno-nationalist prejudice for much longer, but that the idea of prejudice based upon the idea of race is relatively recent and created by (and for) people who came to be regarded as White. I did mistype when I wrote 400 years ago, as I was off in my math by an additional 200 years.
I've been reading about this in a few books, but the one I'm referencing right now is Ibram X. Kendi's "How to Be an Antiracist", which I highly encourage reading. |
