European racism began inside Europe before capitalism or African encounters

Evidence

Yet for all of Robinson’s decentering, he begins his story in Europe. While this might seem odd for a book primarily concerned with African people, it becomes clear very quickly why he must begin there, if only to remove the analytical cataracts from our eyes. This book is, after all, a critique of Western Marxism and its failure to understand the conditions and movements of Black people in Africa and the Diaspora. Robinson not only exposes the limits of historical materialism as a way of understanding Black experience but also reveals that the roots of Western racism took hold in European civilization well before the dawn of capitalism. Thus, several years before the recent explosion in “whiteness studies,” Robinson proposed the idea that the racialization of the proletariat and the invention of whiteness began within Europe itself, long before Europe’s modern encounter with African and New World labor. Such insights give the “Dark Ages” new meaning. Despite the almost axiomatic tendency in European historiography to speak of early modern working classes in national terms—English, French, and so forth—Robinson argues that the “lower orders” usually were comprised of immigrant workers from territories outside the nations in which they worked. These immigrant workers were placed at the bottom of a racial hierarchy. The Slavs and the Irish, for example, were among Europe’s first “niggers,” and what appears before us in nineteenth-century U.S. history as their struggle to achieve whiteness is merely the tip of an iceberg several centuries old. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 17

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. … And as we shall soon see in Part II, from the seventeenth century on, English merchant capital (to cite an important example) incorporated African labor in precisely these terms, that is, the same terms through which it had earlier absorbed Irish labor. … Moreover, European racialism was to undergo a kind of doubling onto itself, for in between the era of intra-European racism that characterized the first appearance of European consciousness and the predatory era of African enslavement, is the almost entirely exogenous phenomenon of Islamic domination of the Mediterranean—the eventual fount of European revitalization and recivilization. … These events were to leave tell-tale marks on Western consciousness: the fear and hatred of “blackamoors”; the demonization of Islam; the transfiguration of Muhammad the Prophet into the anti-Christ. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 384

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s goal of understanding the Black radical tradition’s origins — whiteness as constructed within Europe pre-dates transatlantic slavery. Also connects to David Roediger’s whiteness studies and ‘The Wages of Whiteness.’ — connects to: Racism, not migrancy, should frame European postcolonial settlement history — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 29; Racial categorization first targeted Ireland through internal colonialism — , Stephanie B. Martens - Civilization and…, 26; Racial difference had to be manufactured before Europeans seemed alien (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Establishes the key claim that racialism/racism in Europe precedes capitalism — a foundational definitional move for the book’s core thesis about racial capitalism.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 17; Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 384