European race thinking originated as aristocratic status anxiety

Evidence

If European civilization was not to succumb to decadence and decay, and undergo the same fate as the classical and Asian civilizations, Europeans had to be on guard against mixing with different races and lower elements, for in any combination, the lower element would predominate. This applied primarily to aristocracies in Europe who had to keep their distance from the peasantry and lower classes. Thus in many ways, “race” thinking started out as status anxiety on the part of aristocracies and upper classes in Europe, who at the time felt threatened and insecure because of the revolutionary changes at the turn of the eighteenth century. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 189

Categorization

• DEFINE: Provides a distinctive origin account of ‘race’ as class/status anxiety internal to Europe rather than a colonial taxonomy — highly relevant to sharpening vault-wide definitions of racialization’s genealogy.
• XREF: Connects to Omi and Winant’s racial formation account and contests purely colonial-origin genealogies of race also used elsewhere in the vault. — connects to: Racial ideology grew from status anxiety, not empirical perception of threat — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 195; Admiration for aristocratic rule slid logically into racial contempt — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 224
• SEED: Angle: ‘the purity doctrine was class-coded before it was race-coded’ — a piece tracing how anti-miscegenation ideology in Europe first disciplined aristocrats from peasants, only later being exported to colonial subjects.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 189