“In other words, the planters recognised that far from white
and black automatically hating each other, there was a likelihood of some whites establishing close relations with the slaves—and the colonial authorities sought to stamp this out by giving slave owners the power of life and death. It was now that racism began to develop as an ideology.
The prevalence of racism today leads people to think it has always existed, arising from an innate aversion of people from one ethnic background for those from another.
Slavery is then seen as a byproduct of racism, rather than the other way round.
Yet in the ancient and medieval worlds, people did not regard skin colour as any more significant than, say, height, hair colour or eye colour. Tomb paintings from ancient Egypt show fairly random mixtures of light, brown and black figures. Many important figures in Roman history came from north Africa, including at least one emperor;
no text bothers to mention whether they were light
or dark skinned. In Dutch paintings of the early 16th century, black and white people are shown as mixing freely—as, for instance, in Jordaens painting Moses and Zipporah, which shows Moses wife as black.
There was often deep hostility to Jews in medieval Europe. But this was hostility on the basis of religion, as Jews were the only non-Catholic group in a totally Christian society, not on the basis of allegedly inherent physical or mental characteristics. Their persecutors would leave them alone if they sacrificed their religious beliefs. What
was involved was irrational religious hatred, not irrational biological racism. This only arose with the slave trade.”
– source “A PEOPLES HISTORY OF THE WORLD,” “Slavery and racism,” Chapter 5
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http://www.istendency.net/pdf/5_05_slavery_racism.pdf
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