The contemporary mood of frustration and pessimism about racism springs from the conviction that American society may never be able to get rid of it. Perhaps, after all, racism is a universal staple of the human psyche, or at least so deeply ingrained in Western consciousness that it is now ineradicable. In order to see whether this gloomy view is warranted, let us turn some of our basic assumptions about racism into questions.

Is racism a universal phenomenon, as sociologist Todd Gitlin has written? Has slavery fixed the notion of black inferiority in the mind of whites, as political scientist Andrew Hacker has argued? Is racism deeply imbedded in the English language in such terms as blackmail, blackball, black Mass, blacklist, black magic, black market, black sheep, and blackguard, all of which suggest wickedness, disgrace, or corruption, whereas whiteness is perennially associated with purity and goodness?

I intend to show that all these views are incorrect. My examination of the historical record will reveal that racism did have a beginning, that it developed prior to slavery (although it was later reinforced by slavery) and that far from being the product of irrationality, fear, and hatred, it developed in Europe as part of a rational and scientific project to understand the world.

What Is Racism?

By racism, I mean an ideology of intellectual or moral superiority based upon the physical characteristics of race. Typically, racism entails a willingness to discriminate based upon a perceived biological hierarchy of superior and inferior races.

The prevailing view, shared by virtually everyone who writes about the topic, is that racism is a product of ignorance, fear, and hate. Yet this assumption raises an historical dilemma. If racism is a product of ignorance, why is it that beliefs most people would unhesitatingly consider racist were shared by many of the most enlightened, courageous, and humane figures in America and in the West until only a few decades ago? If racism were a product of unreasonable insecurity and hostility, would we not expect to find it in virtually all societies throughout recorded history? As far as I know, no one--not even those who espouse the universal view of the origins of racism--has made a systematic historical study to identify the presence of racism in all human cultures.

We do have accounts by Chinese historians in the third century B.C. describing encounters with savage people "who greatly resemble the monkeys from whom they are descended." Muslim travellers during the Middle Ages frequently made derogatory comments about blacks. These and other examples seem to establish decisively the presence of color consciousness in various cultures of the ancient world. But do they amount to racism?

At first glance, the hereditary Indian caste system displays many of the features that would be expected in a racist society: lower castes are stigmatized; strict rules prohibit social contact between members of higher and lower castes. But all the members of the various castes belong to the same race. In other words, the caste system erects religious and social distinctions among people who share similar features and could not be easily distinguished simply on the basis of appearance.

The other examples prove equally problematic. The ancient Chinese were highly xenophobic, regarding their "Middle Kingdom" as the center of the universe. For centuries, members of the Chinese ruling class regarded Europeans as barbarians--but they were just as hostile to the Japanese, the Koreans, and other subjugated Asian peoples who looked very much like them. The Chinese never developed a racial hierarchy among peoples or a specifically biological basis. The Chinese, we may say, did not discriminate based on race: they held themselves to be superior to everyone.

Or consider the tenth-century Muslim writer Sa'id al-Andalusi, who wrote that the people of Iraq have "a pale brown color, which is the most apt and proper...They do not come out with something between blond, blanched, and leprous coloring, such as the infants dropped from the wombs of the women of the Slavs ... nor are they overdone in the womb until they are burned, so that the child comes out black, murky, and malodorous." Anthropologists have discovered precisely the same account of the origins of skin color in African and American Indian cultures, only the details are adjusted so that the ideal complexion belongs to the group espousing the belief.

Ethnocentrism versus Racism

What emerges from these examples is a crucial distinction that anthropologists and historians make between racism on the one hand, and tribalism or ethnocentrism on the other. While racism refers to the hierarchial ranking of human beings based on biological characteristics, tribalism and ethnocentrism are nothing more than an intense preference for one's own group over strangers. Nationality, religion, shared traditions, and mere geographical proximity are much more common denominators for tribalism and ethnocentrism than is race. While racism is necessarily rooted in biology, ethnocentrism is typically rooted in culture.

Racism and Slavery

If racism is not strictly universal, perhaps it originated, as some scholars suggest, as an ideological handmaiden of slavery. On one point these scholars are surely right: over time in America, the practice of slavery supported and perpetuated racism. But it does not follow that slavery can account for the origin of racism. Indeed, racism burgeoned and flourished in Europe from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries even in places such as the Scandinavian countries where there were few slaves, or none at all. Racial bias against blacks seems to have existed before transatlantic slavery and indeed to have constituted one of the reasons that Europeans chose to transport Africans as slaves to the new world. It is surely significant, after all, that Europeans did not persist in enslaving Indians or other groups but ended up with an exclusively black slave population. Racism is habitually equated with slavery today because the two practices evolved together in America. But in this respect the American experience is historically unique.

Slavery is a universal institution practiced in virtually all nations for thousands of years. The ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Assyrians all practiced slavery. The Greeks and Romans employed slaves as domestic servants. In ancient Burma, northern Europe, and the Near East, slaves were also used as articles of trade and sometimes as a form of currency. The ancient Chinese used both domestic and imported slaves and customarily buried them alive with their deceased masters.

Yet the remarkable fact about slavery in the ancient world is that it had little or nothing to do with race. Indeed, most of the slaves in ancient India, China, Europe, and Africa belonged to the same race as their owners. The largest number were probably white slaves: the word "slave" actually derives from the term "Slav," a reference to the large number of white slaves captured from that region of Central Europe. During the Middle Ages, in the cosmopolitan slave markets of Baghdad and Constantinople, traders erected platforms for the display of black slaves, white slaves, brown slaves, and yellow slaves.

Slaves were inevitably degraded on account of their social status, not on account of race or color. Pierre Van Den Berghe concludes, "Slavery has often existed without a trace of racism. Conversely, racism can develop and persist in the absence of slavery."

Were the Ancients Racist?

A third possibility for the origin of racism, promoted mainly by Afrocentric scholars, is that racism is a uniquely white pathology which can be traced to the beginnings of Western civilization.

The question of whether the Greeks, Romans, and early Christians were racist was thoroughly examined by African American scholar Frank Snowden, perhaps the world's leading expert on how blacks were viewed in ancient civilization. Snowden found that despite the awareness of color differences in the ancient world, neither the ancient Greeks nor the early Christians espoused anything resembling a theory of racial superiority. Indeed, by and large the two groups espoused a positive view of the African blacks they knew best--the Ethiopians.

Like countless other peoples, the Greeks were ethnocentric and regarded aliens as "barbarians," an omomatopoeia apparently derived from the incomprehensible bar-bar-bar sound made by foreigners. Yet the epithet applied to anyone who could not speak Greek; the Greeks did not describe as barbarians anyone on account of their skin color.

The Greeks were well aware of variations in features and skin color. Like many other people in the ancient world, however, the Greeks typically attributed differences of appearance and custom to the influence of geography and climate. In general, the Greeks attributed the dark skin of the Ethiopian to the sun's heat.

We can also see the Greek understanding of racism and slavery in the work of Aristotle. Even as he supports the institution of slavery, Aristotle distinguishes between natural and conventional slavery, recognizing that many foreign people are enslaved purely on account of accidents such as shipwreck, kidnapping, or being captured in war. Aristotle made a crucial distinction between free men who are capable of being citizens and slaves by nature who are incapable of assuming personal and civic responsibilities.

Christianity today is routinely criticized for encouraging, if not inventing, racism, sexism, and homophobia. Yet in Christianity (as in Islam), the primary distinction was between the believer and the infidel. As Saint Augustine emphasizes, it is through the instrument of conversion that all may be equal as children of God and as citizens in Christian civilization. In the apostle Paul's letter to the Galatians we read, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."

It should not be imagined that the absence of racism in the ancient world can be easily explained by the lack of civilizational contact between peoples. In fact, such contacts have existed for more than two millennia. Yet the contacts did not generate extreme imbalances of power.

Merchants from China, India, Europe, and North Africa, for example, engaged in a sophisticated trade in horses, wool, silk, glass, and precious gems. Traders, monks, missionaries, and diplomats maintained a steady contact over several centuries between the most highly developed civilizations of the ancient world. Yet such early contacts did not generate widespread convictions of intrinsic superiority, mainly because these civilizational exchanges in the ancient world were transacted between nations that had developed the economic, military, and cultural resources to project across continental chasms. Only the richest and most powerful civilizations of the period could sustain trade and contact over great distances; the most primitive cultures remained in relative isolation. Although there was no shortage of arrogance toward each other on the part of the Arabs, Europeans, Indians, and Chinese, no group was strong enough to entirely dominate the others. Their hubris, it seems, was tempered by respect among rivals of comparable strength.

The Chinese arrived on the coast of Africa several times between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. Hailing from perhaps the richest, most learned, and most technically skilled civilization on earth, Chinese sailors, like the Arabs before them, were struck by what they viewed as the barbarism of southern Africa, and speculated that Africans seemed incapable of developing an advanced society. But the Arabs and the Chinese seem not to have developed a systematic ideology of racism. Instead, what the Arab and Chinese encounter with Africa illustrates is the acute civilizational arrogance that goes with relative political, economic, military, and technological superiority. All cultures begin with notions of their own superiority; when such arrogance is biologized, racism is the result.

The Civilization Gap

It is difficult for us to uncover the origins of European racism because we see the world through our own prejudices and terminology. Similarly, the issue of civilizational superiority seems less important because to some extent we live in a global civilization strongly influenced by the West.

The early European travelers were, by our standards, gullible about the rest of the world. Many of them believed tales from the Middle Ages about such things as strange sea monsters and dog-headed men living beyond the Holy Land. Columbus himself fully anticipated finding people born with tails and other progidies on his voyages.

Much of the European fascination with the Far East was fired by the travel accounts of the Venetian explorer Marco Polo. The Portuguese did not go to Africa in search of slaves; they were attracted by legends of African gold, and they wanted to find a way to the spice treasures of Asia. Whatever their shortcomings and mixed motives, the Europeans who voyaged abroad were the historical instruments of a major world transformation: the advent of modernity.

Up until the late Middle Ages there were several civilizations of comparable military, economic, and political strength: Chinese, North African, and Indian. But between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, this relative equilibrium began to change, and Europe emerged decisively as the most vibrant and powerful civilization. European strength was indicated by increased production of goods, which generated rising standards of living; by increases in the population, owing to a declining death rate; by an increase in knowledge; and by military sophistication, which reflected both wealth and the application of new inventions.

The reasons for Western hegemony are complex, but essentially the rise of Europe is connected to the evolution of three systems: science, representative self-government, and capitalism.

The rudiments of human curiosity, participation in public affairs, and the trading impulse are obviously universal traits. But the West developed specific institutional channels for these human proclivities--for instance, universities, parliamentary systems, joint stock companies--and specific mechanisms for formulating and adjudicating political, economic, and general information--for instance, elections, the free market, the scientific method.

These developments produced not simply a different way of fighting wars or building cathedrals, but a radically new way of seeing the world and man's place in it. No longer did the best minds in Europe think that they lived in an "enchanted world," governed by mysterious spirits; rather, they were increasingly convinced that the universe operated according to rational laws, discernible to the unassisted human mind. The rise of Europe is connected with powerful ideas that we are now fully conversant with, but which were then entirely new, such as the idea of a coherent and intellectually accessible world and the idea of progress. For the first time, in the West, it was possible to envision man exercising dominion over the elements. Thus Europeans began to think of their own society as moving ahead, while other groups remained stagnant.

Europe between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries was a rich, powerful, increasingly self-conscious, and rapidly-changing civilization. Several other societies had produced important inventions. Yet civilizational development does not always accrue to the originators or even the preservers of ideas, but to those who employ them in creative ways. European civilization was able to use foreign ideas and innovations, along with its own, to transform itself, while the institutions of other societies remained relatively unchanged.

One reason for the growth of European power and influence is that Europeans developed the scientific method which produced not simply a plethora of inventions, but what historian William McNeill calls "the invention of invention," a systematic process for building on knowledge, and for correcting mistakes, that no other culture possessed, and that was simply alien to the ancient world. Europe was also in the midst of political and social revolutions, which introduced for the first time the idea of representative self-government on a wide scale. In short, before the fifteenth century it made no sense to speak of Europe, only of medieval Christendom. But when Columbus sailed, the concept of Western civilization was beginning to coalesce. And between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the West made a swift and irreversible transition from a traditional society to a modern society. Enlightenment would help to produce Western success, and also Western racism.

The Embarassment of Primitivism

It is no accident that it was the Portuguese who arrived on the shores of black Africa and not black Africans who voyaged to Europe. The Portuguese had the three-mast ship, the compass, the quadrant, navigation charts, and a comparatively good knowledge of winds, currents, stars, and latitutes. The Portuguese knew, as did educated Europeans of the time, that the earth was not flat. When they sailed abroad in the second half of the fifteenth century, they left an emerging modern European civilization which had huge Gothic cathedrals, almost a hundred universities, hundreds of printing presses, and some 15,000 book titles in circulation.

Europeans had cannons, body armor, and gunpowder; modern business methods such as checks, bills of exchange, insurance, and double-entry bookkeeping; mechanical clocks and precision instruments. They used tools to harness the power of wind and water to grind grain, crush ore, mash pulp for paper, saw lumber and marble, and pump water. As years went on, this technical head-start would soon produce a large gap between Europe and the rest of the world.

Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the most advanced civilization in the world basically crashed into the shores of sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas, two regions which were, by European standards, incomparably primitive. In many of the tribes of southern Africa and the Americas, the natives had no numbers that went beyond one or two. The Europeans, increasingly skeptical and rationalistic in their outlook, became disdainful of peoples who believed that dancing and shouting made it rain, that diseases could be cured by wearing masks, or that women could give birth to animals.

Southern Africa and the Americas were not the most primitive cultures in the world. Between the sixth and the fifteenth century, Africa saw the rise of the kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay which were large, rich in gold, and politically integrated. In the Americas, the Maya, Inca, and Aztec civilizations were impressive for their sophisticated knowledge of the seasons and stars, an advanced calendar, elaborate techniques of weaving and ornamentation, a pictorial alphabet, and architectural brilliance that amazed the Spanish. Africa and the Americas were undoubtedly more developed than some of the monsoon forests of southeast Asia, some of the steppe and forest zones of northern Eurasia, and the islands off the coast of India and Australia, such as Tasmania and the Andaman and Nicobar islands, which were still in the paleolithic stage when Europeans arrived there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Nonetheless, the historical record clearly illustrates the extreme civilizational disadvantage imposed by relative isolation. Apart from the availability of natural resources, the main reason for the relative underdevelopment of Africa, the Americas, and many other parts of the world--compared with China, India, Europe, and the Arab world--seems to be geographical separation.

Civilization is largely a product of cultural interaction and shared knowledge. Yet the Americas were cut off from the rest of the world by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Black Africa is largely partitioned from north Africa by the Sahara desert. Three of the crucial instruments for a society to rise above the meager subsistence level are the wheel, the plow, and writing. But the wheel was unknown in virtually all of black Africa, and also in pre-Columbian America. (Strangely enough, the wheel did exist in Mexico --but it was used only as a toy.) Virtually no community in the Americas nor black Africa knew about the plow until Europeans introduced it in the modern era. With the exception of Mayan hieroglyphics, writing was unknown in the Americas, even to the relatively advanced Aztecs. In black Africa, literacy was confined to small enclaves such as Islamic outposts in Timbuktu and the Christian culture in Ethiopia.

It is impossible, even for scholars hostile to the West, to deny the civilization gap. But contemporary social science is firmly committed to the presumption of the equality of all cultures. Consequently, the very subjects of primitivism and progress, of development and underdevelopment, frequently generate discomfort and even indignation. Only a few historians today will say publicly that the most advanced communities of American Indians and African blacks were between one and four thousand years behind the West in technological development.

The Collapse of Environmentalism

One of the paradoxes of history, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked, is that the barbaric victors of battles between civilizations often recognize their cultural deficiencies and learn from the societies they have subdued. When the Romans supplanted the Greeks as the primary force in southern Europe, for example, they acknowledged Greek cultural superiority. Similarly, the primitive hordes from northern Europe who sacked Rome came to embrace the Christian faith and acquired, however partially, the essentials of Greco-Roman civilization.

By contrast, the Europeans of the modern era were both the more advanced civilization and the conquering power, which resulted, as Tocqueville warned, in uninhibited arrogance on the part of the victors and the total degradation of the vanquished. Yet Europeans from ancient times were familiar with themes of civilizational superiority, and had generally attributed them to climate. Racism developed when this so-called "environmental" explanation for vast cultural differences was found by many Europeans to be untenable. When neither skin color nor lack of scientific and intellectual achievement could no longer be blamed plausibly on the soil or the sun, environmental theories fell into disrepute.

Along with the Arabs, many Europeans had argued that Africans were blackened by the sun, and then passed on blackness as a hereditary feature to their descendants. Some even predicted that if Negroes were brought to cold countries, over a few generations their skin would lighten. It did not take long to realize the error of that assumption. (Nor did whites who went to live and work in the West Indies and other tropical zones begin to turn black.)

When the English and French in America went north, where the climate was cooler, they were confident that they would find Indians with lighter skin; again, this expectation was proven wrong. Many Europeans who followed Columbus to the Americas also believed that the primitive condition of the native Indians was largely the result of their living close to the line of the Equator. As Englishmen and Frenchmen moved northward, many of them expected to see Indian civilization improve in temperate and cooler climates. This turned out not to be the case; indeed, the most advanced Indian civilization was centered in the relatively hot environs of today's Mexico City. As the French moved north into what is now Canada, they found nothing of comparable sophistication.

It is important to recognize that Europeans were entirely convinced, based on the Bible, that all humans were simultaneously created by God and had inhabited the planet for the same amount of time. They found it difficult to give an explanation for why one society seemed to have accomplished so much and other societies so little. Many began to assert that the attributes of race, color and human achievement are intrinsic, that some people are simply superior to others by nature. And since race and color appear to be hereditary, and since Europeans could not help noticing that they were white and the people they considered barbarian were dark-skinned, they concluded that there must be some relationship between physical attributes or race and civilizational achievement. Thus it was that European racism came into the world.

The Nature of Superiority

It is a great mistake to think of the early European racists as being ignorant and fearful. On the contrary, they were the most learned and adventurous men of their age. Their views developed as a rational and increasingly scientific attempt to make sense of the diverse world that was for the first time being encountered as a whole. We see evidence of racism, complete with rejection of environmental explanations of human differences, in the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment. Hume, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Kant, and Hegel were among the many who entertained racist views, although these did not make up the main part of their philosophy.

Nowhere is the racist worldview stated more comprehensively than in the writings of the French diplomat and scholar Joseph Arthur de Gobineau. In The Inequality of Human Races (1853), Gobineau drew on the discoveries made by Orientalists that there was a common Aryan source for Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and German. He argued that the highest aspirations of humanity were embodied in these Aryans, a single white family of Germanic peoples who had infused European and even Asian culture with its brilliance and vigor. Gobineau wrote that the existence of advanced and backward races--the former who live by codes of civility, ingenuity, and technological comfort, the latter who live by laws of force at a subsistence level--proves that some races are naturally superior to others. He defied his readers to cite one example of an advanced black civilization or even one truly great scientific invention accomplished solely by a black African.

In the twentieth century, many of these racist ideas would come under ferocious assault, both on intellectual and moral grounds. Eventually the antiracist view would prevail, and racism would be redefined to suit the new politics of a new age. But it is important to recover the origin of racism, because it teaches us that racism had a beginning both in space and in time. Whatever its later career, racism began as part of a rational project to understand human differences.

Racism originated as an assertion of Western cultural superiority that was eventually proclaimed to be intrinsic. From the ancient world we get a glimpse of societies that respected nature rather than seeking to subdue and conquer it; that were aware of physical differences but attached no importance to them--perhaps a model for a better society than the one we have now. In any event, there is no historical warrant for the extreme pessimism that holds that racism has always existed and will always exist. Painful though we may find it to read what people in earlier centuries had to say about others, it remains profoundly consoling to know that racism had a beginning, because then it becomes possible to envision its end.

Dinesh D'Souza is the John M. Olin Research Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.