Racialism entered Western social thought as early as the feudal period

Evidence

Even more significantly, the deepest structures of “historical materialism,” the foreknowledge for its comprehension of historical movement, have tended to relieve European Marxists from the obligation of investigating the profound effects of culture and historical experience on their science. The ordering ideas that have persisted in Western civilization (and Marx himself as we shall see was driven to admit such phenomena), reappearing in successive “stages” of its development to dominate arenas of social ideology, have little or no theoretical justification in Marxism for their existence. One such recurring idea is racialism: the legitimation and corroboration of social organization as natural by reference to the “racial” components of its elements. Though hardly unique to European peoples, its appearance and codification, during the feudal period, into Western conceptions of society was to have important and enduring consequences. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 114

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines racialism as the naturalization of social hierarchy via racial categories.
• XREF: Connects to contemporary work situating racism’s deep history before modern racial science (e.g. Frank Snowden, Geraldine Heng).
• QUESTION: What specific feudal-era codifications of racialism does Robinson have in mind, and what is his evidence for dating it that early?