European racial ideology predated and justified the African slave trade, not vice versa

Evidence

Such was the character of the world consciousness that dominated thought in Western Europe. Its origins, as we have seen in Part I, were intra-European rather than a reflex of encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans. Indeed, the social base to which this conception was a response assumed its sociological forms more than a millennium before the advent of an extensive European trade in African workers and they were not easily displaced even by the eighteenth century. This cultural tradition of a moral and social order that rested on racial distinctions was nevertheless readily available for the extension to Asian, African, and other non-European peoples when it became appropriate. With respect to the African, that occasion presented itself in the trade that saw its most bountiful fruition in the New World. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 401

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how white supremacy as a pre-formed worldview was projected onto Africans; also parallels how racial ideology in the Americas was constructed before and to justify material extraction. — connects to: Europeans already possessed race as a ready concept before enslaving Africans — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 56; Denying colonial subjects the rights Europeans fought for required racializing them as essentially fixed; Medieval Europeans did not view dark-skinned Africans as naturally inferior. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1119