Scholars conflate racism with color prejudice and deny European-on-European racism

Evidence

Morgan is willing to argue that “In the eyes of unpoor Englishmen the poor bore many of the marks of an alien race.” Morgan, op. cit., pp. 325–26. In the next breath, however, he declares: “To be sure, poverty was not genetically hereditary… . The poor were not born of another color than the rest of the population, but legislation could offer a substitute for color” (ibid.). He appears to link specifically racial prejudice to differences in color; that is without color, a prejudice may emerge that is only like racism: “The contempt that lay behind these proposals [the enslavement of the poor] and behind many of the workhouse schemes is not easy to distinguish from the kind of contempt that today we call racism” (ibid., p. 325). — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1725

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s running argument about racial capitalism preceding and including slavery.