Europeans invented the concept of race as we know it
Its origins can be traced to the colonization of the Americas
▻https://timeline.com/europeans-invented-the-concept-of-race-as-we-know-it-58f896fae625
What do you think of when you hear the word “ghetto?” If you’re like most people, you envision black and Latino urban areas. If you know your history, you might think of pre-World War II Warsaw, or the early 20th century migrations of Jews, Italians, and others to the lower East Side tenements of Manhattan. But what comes to mind for the majority of Americans are pictures of the Bronx, Bedford Stuyvesant, Newark, Compton, East LA, West Town, or Englewood. Cities with recognizable earmarks: food deserts, poorly subsidized schools, and inadequate housing. And, like their urban counterparts and Native American reservations, most of these areas were designed to contain particular groups of people and control their movements through economic, political, and physical coercion. The plain fact is that while we sometimes associate ghettos with class, we most frequently see poverty associated with race. But what remains unknown to most Americans is the long and purposeful way that racial categories themselves were brought into existence. Race, as we currently understand it, as we currently live it, is almost entirely a product of the European imagination.
Much of the existence of race can trace its origins to the colonization of the Americas. The categories and meanings of race have changed over time and geography. Suffice it to say, no one was white or black until the colonization process needed ways of differentiating various rights, privileges, social, and legal standings between various laborers. Fifteenth century European countries were not the modern nation states of today, so there was no concept of being “Italian,” for instance. People identified with regional areas, as Calabrese, Genoan, etc. When Europeans did use the term “race” it was employed to talk about tribal groups, such as the “Teutonic races” and while those categories might have been used as indicators of “types” they were by no means seen as limiting or indicative of innate inferiority. Religion and class were the most important divisions, and race as we know it had not been invented.