Inventing Racism

RACISM plays such an important role in our American society today, and has been so prominent throughout American history, it is tempting, even natural, for Americans to assume that "racism" per se, the notion that the human species can be and is divided into several different races - the exact number varies widely - is widely assumed to be older than dirt, older than the stars, having been around forever. however, actually, racism is a rather modern invention. The fourteenth century is a good estimate. Before then, all the way back to Greek and ancient oriental cultures, groups of people were singled out as enemies, inferior, or whatever. But these inferiors were always described in terms of where they lived, how they dressed, how they lived, what they did, and so forth. Actual skin pigmentation was secondary, if mentioned at all. When people like Christopher Columbus began imposing the European will upon people in various part of the world, including the Caribbean and Africa, most particularly enslaving them, race was cited as justification. Portuguese travel diaries started making mention of skin color, and associating it with qualities which they thought rendered certain groups inferior, deserving of enslavement. There is a fascinating Podcast, "The Invention of Race", which details the process. The British colonies in America, all through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, perfected racism, elevating the idea to never seen prominence. The United States became the most racist culture in human history, and, arguably, still is. the rest of the world, however, has caught on quickly, and contributed to the questionable concept of "race" by embracing it. Perhaps the next step in human cultural evolutional will be to allow racism to fade out of existence, as a bad idea, an invention whose time has come to cease to exist.