Proto-racist

Racist doctrines were not fully utilized to justify slavery in the Americas until the nineteenth century (though proto-racist ideas were so employed in the previous two centuries), in part because slavery was not thought to require a moral justification, and in part because the concept of "race" had not been fully developed.

Hannaford insists that later thinkers from the Renaissance onwards selected bits from Greek texts that fitted with their ideas about race, thus casting thinkers such as Aristotle and Plato as proto-racist and misunderstanding the real character of Greek ideas.

From this perspective, although the Greeks and Romans did not embark on the kind of institutionalised racism that was commonplace in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, proto-racist ideas did exist in Greco-Roman texts.

This assumption had its origins in the ideas of nineteenth-century critics of utilitiarianism. These critics — they might be romantics, historicists, nationalists, or proto-racists — held that utilitarianism took individuals and their interests as the building blocks of social and political theory, was oblivious to the historical determinants of "human nature" and hence left no room for a strong conception of nationhood and nationality, let alone a bilogically grounded deterministic conception of race.

The church fathers allegorized biblical references to Ethiopians (in the LXX and New Testament) as symbols for sin, going so far as to depict devils as black Ethiopians; nevertheless, historians still view them as inheritors of the classical literary tradition that employed black-white color symbolism to represent good and evil instead of as proto-racists.

In the wake of two wars, these men, their families, and servants were probably fearful of Indians; they certainly did not consider them their equals. Yet that did not make them racists or proto-racists, but pragmatic businessmen.

If they had asked, they might have found that the last thing which many minority ethnic people wanted was anti-fascist and anti-racist marches which alerted proto-racists and fascists to the fact that they had a vulnerable minority ethnic population in their midst.

A critical antiracism also points to the need to move away from 'doctrinaire' (MacDonald et al, 1989) and dogmatic forms of antiracism which homogenize and caricature Whites as proto-racists and Blacks as victims.