Racial ideologies arise to justify exploitation already in place

Evidence

“Before the Notts, the Gliddens, the Agassiz, the Mortons made their profound discoveries,” speaking “in the name of science”, Douglass said, humans believed in monogenesis. Nearly all advocates of polygenesis “hold it be the privilege of the Anglo-Saxon to enslave and oppress the African,” he went on. “When men oppress their fellowmen, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression.” Douglass, amazingly, summed up the history of racist ideas in a single sentence. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 530 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The system-justification view is consistent with historical evidence indicating that full-fledged prejudicial ideologies tend to come after, not before, institutionalized forms of tyranny and exploitation. For example, anti-Semitism as a racial ideology first arose in the eleventh century to justify the Medieval Crusades, and virulent forms of anti-Black prejudice were not developed until the fifteenth century to justify the European enslavement of Africans (Frederickson, 2002). System-justifying forms of stereotyping and prejudice render cultural practices and institutions legitimate, rational, and sometimes even necessary and noble. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1398 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

We sometimes forget—and I would argue it is an intentional forgetting—that the racism we are fighting today was originally conjured to justify working unfree Black people, often until death, to generate extravagant riches for European colonial powers, the white planter class, and all the ancillary white people, from Midwestern farmers to bankers to sailors to textile workers, who earned their living and built their wealth from that free Black labor and the products that labor produced. … To borrow a phrase from Ta-Nehisi Coates, racism is the child of economic profiteering, not the father. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1333 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The bourgeoisie reframes exploitation as public service to justify it — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 736; Racial ideology actively constitutes labor regimes rather than merely justifying them — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1448; Exclusion is a distinct racialization process from exploitation and expropriation (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Prejudicial ideologies arise after exploitation, to justify it, not before #corroborates (0.97) — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1398
• Racist ideas arise to justify existing oppression, not cause it #corroborates (0.97) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 530
• Racism was invented to justify economic exploitation, not the reverse #corroborates (0.96) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1333