Race as a configured ideology only appears after the late eighteenth century

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 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Race as a configuration dates only from the late eighteenth century; The Enlightenment laid the basis for modern ideas of race; Eighteenth-century ethnology fused bodily and cultural notions of race together — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 137 (+14 more)

Broader Connections

• Race is a recent ideological configuration distinct from older xenophobic traditions #corroborates (0.95)
• Mixed-race populations’ visibility enabled early modern racism #complicates (0.72) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 229