This is such an intellectually impoverished notion of racism. It's mired in 20th-century theory goo.
You can rest assured that racist reasoning ran rampant throughout world history long before someone coined the word "race" or before 18th/19th century political narratives used it in whatever particular ways.
In a child comment you make the case that racism is when some group holds "tribal/identitarian" notions about an "other" group and attributes essential characteristics to them. You say this has existed throughout history and did not begin in modernity.
Ok.
That doesn't actually disagree with the "20th-century theory goo" though. The goo says that colonizing European empires created "new discourses" about race that served an ideological function in their empire-building. That's a far cry from "those people over the mountains there are barbarous."
The notions of "whiteness" and "blackness," as they still function today (against increasingly strong currents of critique) are clearly something different from that. In pre-modern times, a Viking and a Frank wouldn't have seen themselves as having anything in common. But now (anachronistically) they're commonly "white."
It seems like the confusion here--and I see it repeated all over the place--comes from a failure to clarify terms like "race" and "racism."
There's "racism" in the sense of a prejudice against some other-group that we can identify because they look or act different, and they live over there and we live over here. That has probably been around as long as different kinds of people have been encountering each other.
And then there's "racism," the ideological function where European empires constructed whole new ideas about groups of people that previously would not have seen themselves as having anything in common, in the service of expansion, extraction, domination, slavery, etc.
If you think that's all goo, that's fine, but you need to provide a stronger counter-argument. None of the purveyors of the 20th-century goo actually believe that no one hated other-groups before modernity.
I challenge you to go find a description of race based on skin colour in old Roman texts. The colour of someone's skin is barely commented on in them, more of a novelty about the person, and is not described as being related to "race." And yet they had an empire which spanned from North Africa to Northern Europe.
Race as a category was an invention to justify the form of slave trade during the settling of the Americas.
As expressed by sibling comments -- skin color is irrelevant to my point.
If it's not skin color, it's "those people beyond the mountains" or "the river folk to the south" or "the Babylonians" or whatever.
I'm talking about tribal/identitarian discrimination that ascribes essential natures/behaviors to "other" peoples.
This narrowly-defined and elevated notion of racism along the lines of skin color, Atlantic slave trade dynamics, state-building/citizenship discourses of the last few century, scientific racism and all other fashionable targets of criticism is ultimately just that: a narrow subset of a larger human problem.
Edit: downvoting this without a response is pretty much against the guidelines, I am hardly distracting from the conversation here, and the downvote is not a "disagree" button. I put in a lot of effort to showing you why you have a shallow understanding of the topic; I'm open to being wrong.
Xenophobia and racism are completely separate concepts, although xenophobia does underly racism. It's entirely possible to construct a form of race that relies on other qualitative factors than skin color—just look at colourism, which ironically explicitly lays out non-color qualitative identifiers of "dark and light skinned"—hair type, body shape, hyperpigmentation, prevalence of certain genetic disease, whatever. These terms arose from feedback loops where racist capital dictate societal beauty standards and cultural norms. You certainly can't explain phenomena like skin bleaching or the long history of hair straitening with simple xenophobia. But, colourism is just one effect globalized racist capital has produced.
When academics talk about how racism is a problem, they definitely aren't discussing a general form of qualitative, personal discrimination. These racial structures underly our communities, our politics, our identities, here in America our state's use of slave labor in prisons, how our wealth is divided among our citizens, how we construct and discuss trade deals and foreign "charities" such as the Gates foundation, etc. simply put, you cannot discuss racism without discussing how race is embedded in the structures and processes all around us. These dynamics are easier to ignore in ethnically homogenous societies... unless of course you are a minority or immigrant.
Whiteness and blackness as we know it here in America were invented to formalize the structures of slavery here between the 15th and 18th centuries—this took centuries to move from the enslavement and sale of both Africans and indigenous Americans to a codified racial hierarchy, driven by European capital and nearly complete genocide of the indigenous people. I am sure there are similar narratives in the Congo, in Rhodesia, in South Africa, in Brazil, in European involvement in Southeast Asia, in virtually every part of the carribean and West Indies—it's colonialism, baby!
Every single aspect of the development of racism was ultimately driven by European capital. When countries "decolonialized" the west simply replaced formal state oppression with oppression through trade deals and proxy wars, which could not take course without European capital and violence. Make no mistake, European wealth is racist blood money.
This attitude of "oh the form of racism I learned about on Mister Roger's Neighborhood is just xenophobia with a different name" is just completely ignorant of the past 150-200 years of analysis of race and racism. I recommend these books if you have any serious inclination of discussing race:
* "Black Reconstruction" and "the souls of black folk", by WEB du Bois.
* "Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern" by J. Sakai
* Toni Morrison's "the origin of others" directly addresses your attitude towards racism—after all, though racism is distinct from xenophobia, xenophobia is necessary for racism.
* "Color Stories: Black Woman and Colorism in the 21st century (intersections of race, ethnicity, and culture)" by JeffriAnne Wilder.
* "redefining race: Asian american panethnicity and shifting ethnic boundaries" by Dina Okamato.
* "Marxism and the National and Colonial Question" by Joseph Stalin. Note, I am not a Stalin fan, but he's a decent essayist and laid out an excellent argument for separating the concepts of state sovereignty and nationhood, which is basically a collective recognition of being part of a shared people. You see this in the "union" part of the soviet union and the 56 nations of China, though this is frequently disingenuously translated as "ethnic groups".
* building off the above book, "The Nine Nations of North America" is a must read. This was written by Joel Garreau.
* "the color complex: the politics of skin color in a new millennium." by Kathy Russell
This is also neglecting vast swathes of racial dynamics across central and South America, Asia, Australia and Polynesia—you really can fill up entire libraries with how racism is distinct (materially, culturally, subjectively) from xenophobia and manifests through labor exploitation and capital transfer.
Nothing really semantic I guess, it's just papering over the processes that keep poor places poor and delaying these people from acquiring real equity and protection from the west.
You do realize that slavery, racism and every despicable thing imaginable was the normal state of humanity for 99.999% of our 200,000+ year history? How many languages have names for a group of people based on some common attribute of that people, far before the 17th/18th century? A lot.
Human beings definitely did and still do very awful things. But that word race, as we understand it today, isn't really the thing they used to justify it.
The question is whether "race" as we understand it today was understood that way then. And it wasn't. Not that we can see.
19th century pseudo-anthropology and earlier built up a whole concept of race which essentially defined humanity into subspecies. There was Negroid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid, etc. and these were then attached to specific supposedly scientifically defined traits that went far beyond the colour of skin or shape of eye. That is what is generally meant by race, _still_. And it turns out this is complete and total bunk. There's more genetic diversity and difference within Africa between "blacks" than there is between non-Africans and Africans. So the category of race is of absolutely no use except as a historical or ethno-linguistic-cultural designation, and there as well, it's a pretty crappy one. What do Kenyans and West Africans and African Americans have in common other than skin colour? Very little -- not linguistically, not genetically, and not much culturally, either, but they do share a history of being categorized together as "black" by Europeans.
By saying "people always did this" you're ignoring a very specific meaning of race that has been used to justify, and still is, some pretty stupid _specifically_ awful crap. By calling "race" into question, we try to deal with that crap.
Yes, humanity has always used difference as a way of justifying oppression. But this specific kind of imagined difference, it's important to analyze because it's a very _modern_ designation, without a scientific basis, and it had a very specific purpose, and still does for people who like to peddle pseudo-scientific superiority theories around it.
Herodotus narrates the Athenians promising that they would never betray the Spartans because they are the same race ("homaimos" → "same blood").
I don't know off the top of my head whether the Romans widely knew of the Histories, but it certainly undercuts your claim that these broader categorizations are a recent invention. The Athenians and Spartans clearly recognized a racial idea broader than the cultures of their individual polities.
What does that have to do with this conversation? Agreeing on the meaning of words is necessary for basic discourse. It's not like distinguishing race and ethnicity is a redefinition during the course of conversation.
If you don't accept the distinction of course you're going to be blind to dependent concepts. That's just a basic failure of communication.
Ethnicity and race are distinct concepts. Come out of your bubble, the world is not US. It is an important distinction to understand what is really going on in the world.
I make very arbitrary example. Lets take Poles and Russians. Both usually pale skinned, slavish people. Still they have such huge cultural and historical differences that they could not by any change form a single political entity.
Still there could be individuals among them that could argue that darker skinned people who are descendants of their nationals are not really Polish, Russian because of their skin color.
These people are racists. The people who argue that Poles are not Russians are not racists. These are just rational persons.
You can rest assured that racist reasoning ran rampant throughout world history long before someone coined the word "race" or before 18th/19th century political narratives used it in whatever particular ways.