Seeing White

The modern narrative about the origins of racism is misleading.

Many people believe that racism was a natural reaction when Europeans encountered people with darker skin tones. Since they didn’t perceive them as quite human, the narrative goes, they treated people of color badly. In truth, exploitation came first. Throughout the early years of European contact with the Americas, for example, enslaving people allowed farmers to grow labor-intensive crops cheaply. People created the concept of race, racist ideas as well as the concepts of whiteness and white superiority to justify exploitation that was already occurring.

A Portuguese man named Gomes de Zurara was among the first to put racist ideas into writing. Zurara wrote a biography about Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator, who spent much of the early 1400s enslaving people from Africa. Zurara claimed that people in Africa “lived like beasts” with “no understanding of good, but only knew how to live in bestial sloth.” Prince Henry was saving them by introducing them to Christianity and offering slavery as a superior life to what they knew. Zurara’s justification for slavery circulated ...