Racial prejudice emerged only with European colonization and capitalism

Evidence

This provoked the dissent of his principal critic, the black Trinidadborn sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox, who insisted that racial prejudice as it was known in the twentieth century had not existed before the European colonization of the Americas. It developed concomitantly with Western capitalism so that “race relations … are labor-capital-proflts relationships” (Cox, 1948:336). Nevertheless, he agreed with Park that interpersonal relations could be racial only if the parties were conscious of their differences as being racial. He made this explicit when he wrote that “two people of different ‘race’ could have a relation that was not racial.” Cox stated that in Brazil “colored-and-white amalgamation is far advanced,” implying that this was because it had no white ruling class. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 660

Categorization

• XREF: Cox’s anti-capitalist account of racial prejudice resurfaces later in racial formation theory and world-systems analyses; echoes arguments in the essay on sacrifice about how stratified economies sustain hierarchies. — connects to: Race-as-inferiority toward Arabs and Muslims emerged only with nineteenth-century colonial power — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 142
• QUESTION: Worth checking whether Cox’s ‘race relations as labor-capital-profits’ formulation anticipates modern racial capitalism scholarship (Robinson, Kelley).