Racial inferiority ideology emerges from oppression, not merely from perceived difference

Evidence

People are more readily perceived as inferior by nature when they are already seen as oppressed. Africans and their descendants might be, to the eye of the English, heathen in religion, outlandish in nationality, and weird in appearance. But that did not add up to an ideology of racial inferiority until a further historical ingredient got stirred into the mixture: the incorporation of Africans and their descendants into a polity and society in which they lacked rights that others not only took for granted, but claimed as a matter of self-evident natural law. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 190

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how material power structures create ideology - parallels the law merchant material where institutions arise from structural economic conditions.
• DEEPTHINKING: A paradigm-shifting inversion of the common assumption that racism causes oppression - here oppression causes racial ideology.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what empirical evidence distinguishes ‘racism causes oppression’ from ‘oppression causes racism’?

Related

• Perceived natural inferiority arises only after actual oppression. (similarity 0.89)
• Racial ideology predated and prepared for the creation of the Negro (similarity 0.81)
• Race ideology arises from lived terror of the alien before imperial theory (similarity 0.80)
• Discrimination causes racist ideas which cause ignorance and hate (similarity 0.80)
• Racism is naturalized as common sense, not recognized as ideology. (similarity 0.80)
• Races are produced by racism, not by biology (similarity 0.79)
• Racial ideology began as a slave-system byproduct and became a material force (similarity 0.79)
• Race is a product of racism, not its cause. (similarity 0.79)
• Racism combines inferiority-based and difference-based philosophies that coexist rather than alternate (similarity 0.79)
• Racial discourse actively produces exclusion, not just retroactive justification (similarity 0.79)
• Racist ideas arise to justify existing oppression, not cause it (similarity 0.79)
• Races are produced by racism, not biology, through imperial practice (similarity 0.78)
• Racial discrimination can precede and constitute a group’s own racialized self-understanding (similarity 0.78)
• Racist ideologies can be turned into vehicles of opposition and resistance (similarity 0.78)
• Religious identity can become racialized by imputing biological and cultural inferiority (similarity 0.78)