Classic racisms located race as an external colonial invader threatening European homogeneity

Evidence

Classic racisms were formed and fashioned in the contexts of European expansion, enslavement, and colonization. They were the racisms of selfproclaimed European superiority in pursuit initially of new sources of wealth, a servile labor supply, and exotic goods. Over time this came to include expansive territorialization, settlement, globalizing dominance, and with them new lives for the settlers and new forms of desire, dominance, degradation, even death for those thus made servile. The prevailing geographies of early modern racisms then – until at least the later eighteenth century – are projected as Europe’s externality, the colonial outside, provincial extensions vested largely in the rural slaveries of plantation life. Here, the viciousness of the violent structures necessary to uphold the system were hidden just beneath the tranquil façade of settlement: wars, seizures, chains and whippings, death ships and disease, human auctions and forced intercourse. But this violence is revealed variously also in the penning of dehumanizing rationalizations, Sunday sermons, and state edicts. In these classic expressions of racism, race was seen always as a disruption, as the invader, as outsider otherness asserting itself over or inserting itself into local – which was to say, European – homogeneity. Race, as such, was to be kept, if ambivalently, enticingly, at bay. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 359

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how racial ideology constructs the racialized other as external threat — parallels the treatment of ‘immodesty’ panics as outsider disruptions in the immodesty article. — connects to: Pied-noir FN voting stems from mapping colonial enemies onto today’s immigrants — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 854; Racism recruits fragmented narcissistic personalities into oceanic oneness with the racial mass — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1417; Colonial differentiation between Muslims and Europeans is a precursor to race formation — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 112 (+1 more)
• ADDENDUM: The projection of race as an ‘invader’ disrupting local homogeneity parallels the logic of moral panics over dress in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — both frame the feared other as contaminating intrusion rather than systemic condition.