European racial ideology predates colonial encounters and was extended to non-Europeans later

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. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 401

Categorization

• XREF: Reinforces the reader’s existing claim from this book (Part I argument) that racism’s origins were intra-European; connects to wider historiography on early modern racial formation. — connects to: Racial categorization first targeted Ireland through internal colonialism — , Stephanie B. Martens - Civilization and…, 26; Racial difference had to be manufactured before Europeans seemed alien; Europeans already possessed race as a ready concept before enslaving Africans — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 56 (+1 more)