Race thinking was invented by middle-class intellectuals wanting to democratize noble status

Evidence

[T]o transform the whole nation into a natural aristocracy from which choice exemplars would develop into geniuses and supermen, was one of the many “ideas” produced by frustrated liberal intellectuals in their dreams of replacing the old governing classes by a new “elite” through non-political means… . [It was] as significant for English as it was for German race-thinking that it originated among middle-class writers and not the nobility, that it was born of the desire to extend the benefits of noble standards to all classes. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 117

Categorization

• XREF: Contradicts the common assumption that racial hierarchy was elite or aristocratic ideology — connects to Bourdieu-style class analysis of cultural capital. — connects to: The modern cult of creative genius was invented to legitimize bourgeois distinction — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 436; The Enlightenment laid the basis for modern ideas of race