The History of Racism: Origins, Race, and Colonialism Explained

What is racism: a definition of the ideology

Racism is the ideology that human beings can be ranked into "superior" and "inferior" races, and that these supposed differences justify domination, exploitation, or exclusion. As a doctrine it treats visible physical traits — skin colour, hair form, facial features — as markers of fixed mental, moral, and social worth. Modern science, the United Nations, and mainstream anthropology reject this claim outright: there is no biological basis for ranking human populations, and race itself is best understood as a social construct rather than a natural category.

Racism can be explicit or implicit. Explicit racism is openly stated hostility or belief in a hierarchy of races; implicit racism operates through unexamined assumptions and biases that shape behaviour without being announced. It also operates on two levels: individual racism, expressed in personal attitudes and acts, and institutional or systemic racism, embedded in laws, policies, and the everyday workings of organisations. Both the Dismantling Racism Project and scholars such as George M. Fredrickson stress that the institutional form can persist long after openly racist statements become socially unacceptable.

How human races arose

Tens of thousands of years have passed since anatomically modern humans spread widely across the Earth. Throughout that long span, separate human groups were shaped by the varied natural conditions of different zones of the planet: sunlight, temperature, humidity, available food, and much else. These environmental pressures acted on people over many generations.

This could not fail to leave its mark. In different geographic regions people acquired a different outward physical appearance and came to be described as distinct varieties, called races. These are the familiar broad groupings once labelled Black, Mongoloid (once called "yellow"), and European ("white"), each of which can in turn be divided into still smaller groups, or anthropological types. It is somewhere here that the history of racism begins.

Ruling classes exploited these outward differences to prop up a pseudo-scientific theory of natural, biological inequality among people. Proponents of that theory insisted that "higher" and "lower", noble and ignoble races exist — that some consist of born masters with a "natural right" to rule while others are slaves "by their very nature". This is the fiction that anthropologists such as Audrey Smedley and Jonathan Marks have spent careers dismantling.

Races and the anthropological types of humanity

The anthropological "types" invoked by race theorists were never sharp, self-contained categories. It is impossible to draw firm lines between them: often one cannot say where one race ends and another begins. By hair form, Australians resemble Europeans; by nose shape, lip form, and skin colour they resemble Black Africans. Europeans and Australians share another trait — abundant body and facial hair — while Mongoloid and Black populations have almost none. American Indians resemble Mongoloid peoples in hair form and skin colour but Europeans in nose and lip shape, and the Sámi (Lapps) form a kind of connecting link between European and Mongoloid populations.

Because human populations grade continuously into one another and have mixed throughout history, no "pure" race exists, and racial traits are neither fixed nor decisive. Whether a person has soft curly hair or straight coarse hair, prominent cheekbones or a particular nose shape has no bearing whatsoever on intellect, talent, or capacity for work. Every human population, without exception, shares the features that arose through upright walking and labour — the hand, the distinctive foot, a highly developed brain and consciousness, articulate speech — and even in blood there are no racial differences, since all known blood groups occur equally across every population. In every essential bodily respect, the races of humanity are alike.

The difference between race and ethnicity

Race and ethnicity are distinct concepts that racist thinking deliberately blurs. Race, as it was historically constructed, refers to imagined biological groupings based on visible physical traits; ethnicity refers to shared culture — language, religion, ancestry, customs, and collective identity — which a person can adopt, transmit, and change. Sociologists distinguish ethnocentrism (judging other cultures by the standards of one's own) from racism proper, which claims an unalterable natural hierarchy. Confusing the two allowed race theorists to treat cultural groups, "illegitimately called races", as if they were fixed biological kinds.

The origin of the word "race": etymology of the term

The word "race" entered the major European languages only in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, initially meaning a lineage or breeding stock rather than a scientific category. The French physician François Bernier is often credited with one of the first attempts, in the seventeenth century, to divide humanity into a small number of "races" by physical appearance. As historians of the concept such as George M. Fredrickson have shown, the term drifted over time from a loose label for descent groups toward the rigid biological classification that scientific racism would later claim as fact.

The history of racism: how the theory of racial inequality took shape

Racism as a systematic ideology developed alongside European expansion at the close of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the capitalist era. Its roots lie partly in the older antisemitism of medieval and early modern Europe, where Jews were subjected to religious hostility, expulsion, and legal exclusion, and partly in the drive of European merchants and adventurers to seize the wealth of distant lands. The theory of racial inequality was not the cause of conquest but its justification, manufactured after the fact to make exploitation appear lawful and natural.

A useful way to read this history is as a timeline running from the medieval period to the 1960s: from religious prejudice, through the Atlantic slave trade and colonial conquest, to Enlightenment-era racial classification, nineteenth-century imperialism and Social Darwinism, the genocidal racism of the twentieth century, and finally the post-war discrediting of racial pseudoscience and the rise of civil rights and decolonisation movements. Each phase supplied new arguments for the same underlying claim of inequality.

The construction of racial categories and "higher" and "lower" races

The division of humanity into "higher" and "lower" races was a deliberate construction serving those who profited from domination. There was never full agreement among racists of different countries — indeed there could not be. The one thing they all shared was the assertion that races are unequal. But the moment it came to ranking a particular people, whom they illegitimately called a race, the racist camp splintered into mutually hostile factions, each nominating its own nation as the supreme one.

This incoherence is itself telling. As Winthrop Jordan and other historians of American attitudes documented, the categories were reshaped whenever the political need changed. The purpose was never accurate description of humanity; it was to develop hierarchies that could justify seizing land, labour, and freedom from those placed at the bottom.

The history of racism and the influence of the church

The church contributed heavily to the anti-scientific, exploitative theory of racial inequality. Several centuries ago, in the early period of capitalism, European traders and seekers of easy profit began penetrating foreign lands to plunder and exploit their peoples. Christian preachers — missionaries — took an active part in this pillage and set about using the Bible as cover and justification for colonial robbery.

Religious authority gave the enterprise a moral veneer. In the fifteenth century, papal decrees issued under Pope Eugene IV and Pope Nicholas V granted Portuguese expeditions — associated with Prince Henry the Navigator — sweeping licence to subjugate and enslave non-Christian peoples along the coast of Africa, helping to launch the Atlantic slave trade under a claim of spreading the faith.

The biblical myth of the sons of Noah as a justification for slavery

The Bible relates how the god Yahweh, angered at humankind, resolved to send a flood upon the Earth and destroy every living thing.

"I will blot out man, and beasts, and creeping things, and the birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them."

Of all people, so the story goes, Yahweh chose to spare Noah, his three sons — Shem, Ham, and Japheth — and their wives, who according to the Bible became the ancestors of every human being now alive. Church fathers then claimed that the pious, god-beloved Japheth founded the white race, destined to rule over all the peoples of the world; that Shem was the forefather of the "yellow" race; and that Ham was the ancestor of all dark-skinned peoples, who — for some transgression of their forebear — were supposedly condemned to live as slaves of the white man. This reading, the notorious Curse of Ham directed at Ham's son Canaan, became one of the most durable religious justifications for slavery.

Christian missionaries and colonial plunder

The Curse of Ham travelled from European pulpits into the law and folklore of colonial America. In seventeenth-century Virginia and Jamestown, where the first Africans arrived in 1619, clergy and planters invoked scripture to reconcile chattel slavery with Christian belief, arguing that enslaved Africans were the biblical descendants of Ham. The allegory of the era's popular Protestant imagination — John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress used blackness as a symbol of sin — reinforced the association at a cultural level. The 1619 Project, published by the New York Times, later re-examined this founding entanglement of slavery and racial ideology in American history.

European colonialism and the racial justification of exploitation

European colonialism turned racial ideology into a working instrument of empire. As Spain, Portugal, and later other powers seized territory across Africa, Asia, and the Americas — a process opened by voyages such as those of Christopher Columbus — the doctrine of racial inequality supplied a ready explanation for why the conquered should serve the conquerors. Indigenous peoples were dispossessed and worked to exhaustion under the fiction that they were natural inferiors, and the colonial model of racism was exported wherever European flags were planted.

Economic arguments in defence of slavery

Behind the religious and pseudo-scientific rhetoric stood a blunt economic motive. Plantation economies depended on unfree labour, and the profits of the Atlantic slave trade were enormous, so a doctrine that classified enslaved people as property "by nature" protected the balance sheet of the ruling classes. Contemporary economic historians — including Stanford University researchers such as Lukas Althoff, whose work at SIEPR and the Stanford Department of Economics applies applied microeconomics and quantitative methods to inequality studies — have documented how the wealth extracted from enslaved labour compounded into racial economic gaps that persist today.

The doctrine of the "White man's burden" and cultural racism

The "White man's burden" reframed conquest as benevolence, casting empire as a duty to "civilise" supposedly backward peoples. This is the essence of cultural racism: rather than claiming biological superiority outright, it treats one culture as the standard of humanity and all others as deficient. The doctrine underwrote European imperialism and the American idea of manifest destiny, and it justified brutal assimilation programmes — Richard Henry Pratt's boarding-school campaign to "kill the Indian, save the man" being a notorious example. Cultural racism proved more adaptable and longer-lived than its biological cousin precisely because it hides behind the language of progress and uplift.

The Enlightenment and pseudo-scientific race theories

Enlightenment thinkers who prized reason and classification turned that impulse toward humanity itself, producing the taxonomies that scientific racism would later treat as settled truth. Several rival racist theories of the origin of human races emerged. One claimed that the races descended from different species of apes, so that living races were held to be biologically unrelated, endowed with mutually hostile instincts and unequal gifts — some "condemned by nature" to savagery, others the bearers of civilisation entitled to rule. Charles Darwin had already shown that deriving different races from different ancestors contradicts evolutionary theory, so the claim collapses on its own terms.

A second theory conceded Darwin's account of common descent but argued that evolution advanced unevenly, leaving some races "closer to the apes" than others — reaching the same reactionary conclusion of "higher" and "lower" races. The physical evidence refutes it: judged by leg length or by the development of the lips, Black Africans are the furthest of all from apes; judged by skin tone, both the palest and the darkest populations diverge equally from the light-brown shade thought typical of humanity's ape ancestors; judged by nasal projection, Europeans and some American Indians rank furthest. Different traits give different rankings, so deciding which race is "higher" on their basis is simply absurd.

Eugenics and pseudo-scientific racism

Eugenics carried pseudo-scientific racism into the twentieth century by dressing prejudice in the vocabulary of heredity and improvement. Its advocates proposed to "improve" humanity by encouraging reproduction among those deemed superior and restricting or preventing it among those deemed inferior, translating the fiction of ranked races into sterilisation laws, immigration restrictions, and, ultimately, mass murder. The scholarship of the MIT Press and researchers such as John Cheng traces how eugenic thinking spread through respectable institutions before it was discredited, and W. E. B. Du Bois exposed its role in maintaining racial hierarchy in the United States.

Geographic facts in the history of racism

The competition among nationalist racists shows how self-serving the whole doctrine was. Over time, different peoples were nominated as the supposed master race, each promotion driven by political ambition rather than evidence, and the rivalry exposed the ideology's incoherence.

The rivalry of racists from different countries

At various times racists put forward first one nation, then another, as candidate for the "highest" race. French racists asserted their superiority over the Italians, the Italians over the Germans, and the Germans insisted that they were the supreme race with a right to ride on the backs of other peoples. Even after the deranged plans of these factions collapsed and the chief war criminals were condemned by an international court, racists did not fall silent — the loudest boasts of superiority then came from English and, above all, American reactionaries, who claimed that the "American type" was the highest form of humanity and that the "American way of life" ought to be copied by everyone.

Japanese fascism and the claim to dominate Asia

Japanese fascists, not long ago, proclaimed to the world that the Japanese constituted the noblest race. On this basis they asserted a "right" to plunder the Chinese people and other Asian nations and to claim mastery over the whole of Asia — and, eventually, the entire world. It was the same manufactured racial pretext, differing only in which nation placed itself at the summit.

German Nazism, antisemitism, and cultural nationalism

German Nazism drove racial ideology to its murderous extreme. Building on the deep-rooted antisemitism of European history and a cult of cultural nationalism, Nazi Germany under Hitler proclaimed the Germans a master race and defined Jews, Slavs, and others as biologically inferior. This ideology of "racial purity" led directly to the Holocaust — the industrialised extermination of six million Jews and millions of others — the most catastrophic demonstration in history of where the doctrine of racial inequality leads. The Nazi obsession with contested borderlands such as Upper Silesia showed how racial and nationalist claims fused into a programme of conquest and genocide.

Finnish fascism and the attack on the Soviet Union

Even the racists of small Finland strained to convince everyone that they were a chosen race, destined to extend their influence and power across the entire north of the Soviet Union as far as the Urals. Still fresh in memory is the time when Hitler's forces, having come to terms with the Finnish fascists, joined them in attacking the Soviet Union in the hope of destroying the socialist system they despised.

The collapse of racist plans after the Second World War

The defeat of fascism discredited scientific racism as a respectable doctrine. Confronted with the evidence of the Holocaust, the international community moved to repudiate the theory of racial inequality in law and in science. The genuine science of anthropology and genetics had already refuted the fiction of "higher" and "lower" races; after the war, that refutation was written into international instruments.

• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) affirmed the equal dignity and rights of all people without distinction of race or colour.
• The UNESCO Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice gathered leading scientists to state that race, as used by racists, has no valid biological basis.
• The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted by the United Nations, obliged signatory states to prohibit discrimination based on race, colour, and ethnicity.

These frameworks did not end racism, but they removed its claim to scientific legitimacy and created legal tools against it.

The Civil Rights movement and desegregation

In the United States, the legal architecture of racism outlasted slavery by a century. After Abraham Lincoln and the end of the Civil War, the promise of Reconstruction gave way to the Jim Crow laws of the American South — a system of legally codified segregation that barred people of colour from schools, transport, housing, and the ballot. Racial terror, from the Till lynching to countless others, enforced the colour line where the statutes left off.

The Civil Rights movement dismantled legal segregation through decades of organising, litigation, and protest, winning desegregation and voting rights and later measures such as affirmative action intended to counter the accumulated effects of discrimination. Yet as the historians behind the 1619 Project and W. E. B. Du Bois long before them argued, ending explicit legal segregation did not erase the institutional racism woven into American life.

Decolonisation and anti-racism movements

After the Second World War the peoples of Africa and Asia dismantled the colonial empires that racial ideology had been built to justify. Decolonisation stripped away the "civilising mission" rhetoric and, together with anti-racist movements worldwide, reframed racism as a violation of human rights rather than a fact of nature. The struggle against South African apartheid — an explicit state system founded on the ideology of racial purity — became a defining anti-racist cause, and its eventual defeat showed that even the most entrenched legal racism could be overturned.

Racism without a legal foundation: the example of Brazil

Brazil illustrates how racism persists even where the state never enshrined it in law. Brazil abolished slavery without ever adopting Jim Crow–style segregation statutes, yet deep racial inequality endured through economic exclusion, social hierarchy, and everyday discrimination. This is institutional racism without explicit state support: the disadvantage is reproduced by markets, schooling, policing, and custom rather than by statute, which is precisely why it can be so difficult to name and dismantle.

Contemporary cultural racism and discrimination

Cultural racism has become the dominant form in societies that officially reject biological hierarchy. Instead of asserting that a group is genetically inferior, it treats certain cultures, languages, or religions as incompatible or lesser, and uses that judgement to exclude. Blackface minstrelsy is a historical example of cultural racism at work — a form of entertainment that dehumanised Black people through demeaning stereotypes — and the so-called Human Zoos of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which exhibited colonised peoples as spectacles, were its most literal expression.

Discrimination based on race, colour, and ethnicity

Contemporary discrimination based on race, colour, and ethnicity operates largely through implicit bias and institutional practice rather than open declaration. It surfaces in hiring, housing, lending, criminal justice, and media representation, where longstanding stereotypes about Black people and other groups shape outcomes even in the absence of any openly racist rule. Recognising this implicit, systemic form is essential, because it explains why measurable racial gaps survive long after explicit legal barriers are removed.

The legacy of historical racism today

The legacy of historical racism is visible in the persistent gaps in wealth, health, education, and political power that separate groups once ranked as "inferior" from those once ranked as "superior". Economic research using long-run historical data — including work associated with Stanford University and Harvard University economists studying inequality — traces present-day disparities directly back to slavery, colonial dispossession, and segregation. George Santayana's warning that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it captures why confronting this history matters: understanding how racism was constructed is the first step to dismantling what it left behind.

Racism, then, has no footing in nature. Human populations grade into one another, share every essential biological feature, and differ only in traits that have no bearing on intellect or worth. The theory of "higher" and "lower" races was invented to justify plunder, slavery, and empire, and it collapses the moment it is examined. What remains is the task of undoing its consequences — a task that reaches from law and economics into the everyday culture we build together, much as any field of human knowledge, from web development to the sciences, advances only when older errors are honestly confronted and corrected.