Race ideology arises from lived terror of the alien before imperial theory

Evidence

Racism as a ruling device was used in this society of whites and blacks before imperialism exploited it as a major political idea. Its basis, and its excuse, were still experience itself, a horrifying experience of something alien beyond imagination or comprehension; it was tempting indeed simply to declare that these were not human beings. Since, however, despite all ideological explanations the black men stubbornly insisted on retaining their human features, the “white men” could not but reconsider their own humanity and decide that they themselves were more than human and obviously chosen by God to be the gods of black men. This conclusion was logical and unavoidable if one wanted to deny radically all common bonds with savages; in practice it meant that Christianity for the first time could not act as a decisive curb on the dangerous perversions of human self-consciousness, a premonition of its essential ineffectiveness in other more recent race societies. The Boers simply denied the Christian doctrine of the common origin of men and changed those passages of the Old Testament which did not yet transcend the limits of the old Israelite national religion into a superstition which could not even be called a heresy. Like the Jews, they firmly believed in themselves as the chosen people, with the essential difference that they were chosen not for the sake of divine salvation of mankind, but for the lazy domination over another species that was condemned to an equally lazy drudgery. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 508

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the key distinction between racism as lived experience (pre-imperial, Boer) vs. racism as ideological ruling device (imperial) — a scaffold distinction the field carries forward.
• XREF: Connects to the Islamophobia field’s core concern: how the ‘Other’ is constructed and how religious doctrine (here Christianity, later Islam) is neutralized or bent to justify racial exclusion. — connects to: the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: How Ourselves, the True, and Every Other Are Built from War”
• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism described — that denying common humanity with an Other requires re-making the self as superhuman, a ‘god’ — is a dense, paradigm-shifting account of how racism’s logic inverts the self-world relationship.