Race is a modern concept barely existing before the Enlightenment

Evidence

Race itself has proven to be a very contradictory notion. The idea of race barely existed before the Enlightenment and the onset of modernity; indeed it has hada rather rocky relationship with the rationalism and scientism in which the Enlightenment was grounded. Race is certainly a modern concept: It is linked to the conquest of the Americas, the rise of capitalism, the circumnavigation of the globe, the Atlantic slave trade, and the approaches to race and racism, the ethnicity-, class-, and nation-based paradigms. — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 231

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: Recalls discussion of social construction of categories in other theory sources on how modernity invented its core organizing frames.

Related

• Race is a modern concept tied to early global capitalism and colonial conquest. (similarity 0.95)
• Race is a modern construct disguised as ancient, not a premodern condition (similarity 0.87)
• Race is constitutive of the modern nation-state from its emergence (similarity 0.86)
• Race is an unstable, fully-fledged social fact like class or gender (similarity 0.86)
• Race is a contemporary, evolving formation rather than a premodern leftover (similarity 0.86)
• Race is a distinctly modern construct central to globalization (similarity 0.86)
• Race was once understood as a fixed natural essence, not a social construct. (similarity 0.85)
• Race is a modern condition masquerading as ancient (similarity 0.85)
• Race is socially constructed rather than biologically real but has powerful social effects (similarity 0.84)
• Race functioned as an organizing principle tying bodies to social statuses (similarity 0.84)
• Race is a modern construct that states adopt to become modern (similarity 0.84)
• Race structures all major US institutions from the colonial era onward (similarity 0.84)
• Race is constitutive of the modern nation-state, not incidental to it. (similarity 0.83)
• Race is actively constructed through the ongoing act of defining groups. (similarity 0.83)
• Racial theory emerges in response to historical upheavals, not abstract curiosity. (similarity 0.83)