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>Europeans invented racism Perhaps the most absurd assertion I've seen this year, in a year characterized by bizarre assertions.

• Maursault 4y ago
  Though conceptually, racism has existed since the dawn of civilization in pre-recorded history, with dominant peoples discriminating against, stereotyping, repressing and enslaving entire peoples (such as the Egyptian civilization enslaving the Jewish civilization, and including widespread antisemitism from antiquity into the modern era), the concept of race did not enter languages as a specific word until the 15th Century, with the word "race" itself being traced in English to the advent of British imperialism and in Spanish (la raza) to Spanish imperialism.[1] So only in a strictly literal sense did Europeans invent racism, though the English word "racism" itself did not enter language until the late 19th Century or very early 20th Century in America[2] as a reaction to that which had no word yet to describe it, but already existed for centuries in one sense, and for millennia in the wider conceptual sense. [1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/race-human/The-history-of-the-idea-of-rac https://www.britannica.com/topic/race-human/The-history-of-t... [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/01/05/260006815/the-ugly-fascinating-history-of-the-word-racism https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/01/05/260006815...