Europeans invented the concept of race as we know it

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.

Police officers and pedestrians in Harlem, 1970. (Jack Garofalo/Paris Match via Getty Images)

It’s important to note that dating back to the first millennium AD, Africans existed in in Europe, and, from about 711 AD to 1492 most of Spain was under Moorish control. Consequently, the Spanish colonizers who ventured forth to “settle” lands outside of Europe did so while harboring color prejudice associated with their subjugation. But racial categories as we now know them, had not yet been used to justify the denial of basic rights, which were controlled through the church. By contrast, Europeans knew Africa to be a wealthy, advanced continent in many areas of development and education. When the American colonizers started the Atlantic slave trade, they weren’t simply grabbing people out of the trees, as many of us were led to believe. They were targeting well established kingdoms weakened by internal strife, with citizens who had the skills required to develop the colonial enterprises, including advanced agricultural practices, metallurgy, navigation and shipbuilding, as well as the resources from the lands themselves. Race didn’t begin to take on its modern meanings until the mid-16th century, and the terms and meanings that we now give to race in the U.S. weren’t concretized until the early 20th century.

There are three seminal moments for British-American colonies that structure race, only the most recent of which was the first U.S. Census in 1790, establishing race as a set of official categories. That first happened in 1662, when the Virginia colony passed an act stating that “Negro women’s children to serve according to the condition of the mother,” thus undoing centuries of European tradition and law regarding paternity, birth rights, and rights of inheritance. Perhaps more relevantly this act stands as the first real miscegenation law in what would become the United States.

Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 was the second. Feeling unprotected from Native American Nation resistance, workers in Virginia united and violently removed their governor and attacked neighboring indigenous groups. The following colonial backlash had two important results: Native Americans became the “enemy Other” for the new Americans, and Euro-American workers were awarded privileges over their former comrades of color, thus ensuring divisions between the lower classes and laying the racist foundations for class that still divide us. These actions (and a host of other smaller acts) encouraged physical separations between blacks and whites that would become a permanent part of the American tradition and lay the foundation simultaneously for American concepts of race and white supremacy.

Men drinking from segregated water fountains in the American South, photo undated. (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

Intermarriage was discouraged, as white workers were encouraged to believe that they could attain a level of economic and social mobility previously impossible in Europe. Ideologies based on Enlightenment philosophies and the profoundly self-serving ranking of conquered, colonized peoples by the Europeans helped institutionalize European nationalism, anti-indigeneity, racism, wage disparities, and housing discrimination in every country that the Europeans invaded. In short, Europeans brought racism with them wherever they went. In the United States, this would lead to the removals of Native Americans, the institution of the reservation system and ghettoization of native peoples, the exclusion of red and black peoples from enfranchisement, full legal humanity and standing, and traditions of separation and oppression that are now entrenched in our culture. Early 20th century eugenics movements (the pseudo-scientific branch of racism) and Jim Crow laws combined with media technologies to make it possible to perpetuate anti-black, anti-native ideas faster. We soon became saturated with ideas about racial purity and concepts of inferiority and superiority already embedded in our structures. Separate is never equal. And as an economic, educational, and social hierarchy of class blossomed out of racial divisions, we came to presume that people of color are inherently from the lower classes, live in ghettos, and are culturally alien (thus inferior) to “real and true” Americana.

For most, the term “ghetto” is a place. But what history shows us is that it’s the result of a long and deliberate system that allows us to comfortably accept the separation of citizens by race and class, allows us to deny people the tools that support upward mobility. After generations of deliberate ghettoization, our society now persists in the narrative that we’ve welcomed everybody to the table as equals, but they’ve just failed to show up. This is a way of blaming poor people for their alienation, their poverty, their “Otherness.” Ronald Reagan typified this when, in 1988, he said, “Let me tell you just a little something about the American Indian in our land…We have provided millions of acres of land…We’ve done everything we can to meet their demands as to how they want to live…Maybe we made a mistake. Maybe we should not have humored them in that wanting to stay in that kind of primitive lifestyle. Maybe we should have said, no, come join us; be citizens along with the rest of us.”

Ghettos have always been imagined communities made quite literally concrete. To change our society, we need first to have the will to do so, accept our history and its ramifications, and then, precisely as we have imagined our way into this mess, we have to imagine a better society into reality.

by Anjana Cruz