European racism began as intra-European class domination before it was applied to Africans.

Evidence

At the very beginnings of European civilization (meaning literally the reappearance of urban life at the end of the first Christian millennium), the integration of the Germanic migrants with older European peoples resulted in a social order of domination from which a racial theory of order emerged; one from which the medieval nobilities would immerse themselves and their power in fictional histories, positing distinct racial origins for rulers and the dominated. The extension of slavery and the application of racism to non-European peoples as an organizing structure by first the ruling feudal strata and then the bourgeoisies of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries retained this practical habit, this social convention. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 384

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how the racial order prefigured slavery — echoes the chapter on English merchant capital absorbing Irish labor before African labor. — connects to: Europeans already possessed race as a ready concept before enslaving Africans — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 56
• DEFINE: Establishes the first moment of the author’s four-moment schema of European racialism.