Mixed-race populations’ visibility enabled early modern racism

Evidence

In addition, the growth of creole communities, mainly in the Americas, but also in parts of Asia and Africa, led inevitably to the appearance of Eurasians, Eurafricans, as well as Euramericans, not as occasional curiosities but as visible social groups. Their emergence permitted a style of thinking to flourish which foreshadows modern racism. Portugal, earliest of Europe’s planetary conquerors, provides an apt illustration of this point. In the last decade of the fifteenth century Dom Manuel I could still ‘solve’ his ‘Jewish question’ by mass, forcible conversion – possibly the last European ruler to find this solution both satisfactory and ‘natural’. Less than a century later, however, one finds Alexandre Valignano, the great reorganizer of the Jesuit mission in Asia between 1574 and 1606, vehemently opposing the admission of Indians and Eurindians to the priesthood — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 229

Categorization

• DEFINE: Anderson locates the historical origin of ‘racial’ thinking in the visibility of mixed-race groups rather than in biological doctrine per se — a pivotal dating/definitional claim for the field’s genealogy of race.
• XREF: Directly scaffolds the Islamophobia field’s genealogy of race-thinking — this is the pre-history of biological racialism that later Orientalist classification draws on. — connects to: Color stratification encodes fine-grained social status within colonized societies.; Large Black populations in Greco-Roman society did not produce modern color prejudice; Mixed-light complexions gain economic and social status in colonial societies (+2 more)

Related

• Color stratification encodes fine-grained social status within colonized societies. (similarity 0.88)
• Racial difference had to be manufactured before Europeans seemed alien (similarity 0.80)
• European racial ideology predates colonial encounters and was extended to non-Europeans later (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial censuses turned diverse Europeans into a white race by 1911. (similarity 0.80)
• Racism, not migrancy, should frame European postcolonial settlement history (similarity 0.79)
• European racism predates African enslavement and originated as intra-European domination (similarity 0.79)
• Large Black populations in Greco-Roman society did not produce modern color prejudice (similarity 0.79)
• European racialism justified colonial expansion and rule (similarity 0.78)
• Local Africans rejected racial categories until Europeans imposed them (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Large Black populations in Greco-Roman society did not produce modern color prejudice #complicates (0.82)
• Mixed-light complexions gain economic and social status in colonial societies #expands (0.75)
• Racism is a structural feature of European civilization, not the exception of colonial adventurers #responds-to (0.73) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 338