The Origin of Racism

The race and slavery

The race was used to denote the value of human life and although the most famously was bodily traits like the skin colour, the definition of race readjusted from time to time and generation after generations to engulf a heterogeneous compound that consists of intellectual, physical as well as moral characteristics. Therefore, in as much as the Europeans settled on the blackness as well as African descent priority with the sole aim of codifying slavery, the colour of the skin was a secondary to the widely dismissed value of the slaves’ societies, behaviours, as well as the belief in providing a dispossession’s legal foundation. Hence, the Europeans used the ideas of race to mark Africans as primitive and less human to justify the slavery.

What does it mean to describe “race” as a social construction?

Race as a social construct means that the degree of the racial category that an individual may be labelled may vary depending on the social context like differentials of power between groups as well as the temporal proximity to electoral functions, personal factors like the perceiver’s political partisanship, or racism in the perceiver, or an interaction that may occur between social as well as personal elements. Racism here depends on the manner in which an individual identifies with cases of sexual identity amongst other factors. In other words, people make the race, agree on it, reward as well as punish their fellows as a result of the race.

What is at stake in this discussion about the origin of racism?

The slaves’ practices and beliefs are at stake because they were looked down upon and regarded as primitivity. Besides, their geography, beliefs, customs, languages as well as bodies were pressed by the Europeans into their service. Further, there are no clear and precise historical writings that indicate the lineages and geography of the people who are in Europe as a result of the slavery that happened in the past centuries. For instance, some books continue to debate the exact geographical location where the American Indians previously descended. In one book, it is debated that the American Indians were inhabitants of Welsh, Atlantis, or Phoenicians while another suggests that these people descended from the Jews’ ten lost tribes.