It’s a heavy question. Honestly, most of us grew up thinking humans have always hated each other based on skin color. We assume it’s just "human nature" to be wary of people who look different. But if you look at the actual historical record, that's not really the case. When did racism begin? It wasn't at the dawn of time. Ancient Greeks didn't look at a person from Ethiopia and think they were biologically inferior. They might have called them "barbarians" because they didn't speak Greek or follow Greek customs, but it wasn't about their DNA.
The concept of "race" as we know it—a hierarchy based on physical traits—is actually a relatively modern invention. It’s a tool. It was built piece by piece, mostly over the last 500 years, to justify things like the transatlantic slave trade and colonial expansion.
The Ancient World and the Absence of Race
Go back 2,000 years. If you were in Rome, the divide was between "civilized" and "barbarian." A dark-skinned person from North Africa could become a Roman Emperor—and one did, Septimius Severus. People noticed physical differences, obviously. They weren't blind. But they explained those differences through "humoral theory" or geography. Hippocrates and Aristotle thought the environment shaped you. If you lived in a hot climate, you were spirited but maybe lacked intelligence; if you lived in the cold north, you were brave but "dull."
It was about where you lived, not an inherent "race."
Frank Snowden Jr., a legendary historian at Howard University, spent his career documenting this in works like Before Color Prejudice. He found that in the ancient Mediterranean, blackness wasn't a badge of inferiority. It was just a variation. The Greeks and Romans had no word for "racism" because they didn't have the category of "race" to attach it to.
The Turning Point: Why 1492 Changed Everything
So, when did racism begin to look like the monster we recognize today?
Everything shifted during the Age of Exploration. When Europeans started showing up on the shores of the Americas and Africa, they hit a moral snag. You see, they were Christians. Their religion taught that all humans were descended from Adam and Eve. If everyone is "brother and sister" in Christ, how do you justify taking their land or putting them in chains?
You have to make them "less than."
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The Portuguese and Spanish were some of the first to codify this. In the 15th century, Spain introduced limpieza de sangre (purity of blood). It was originally aimed at Jews and Muslims who had converted to Christianity. The idea was that even if you converted, your "blood" was still tainted. This was the first time "biology" was used as a permanent, unchangeable marker of status.
The Science of Making Up Categories
By the 1700s, the Enlightenment was in full swing. This era was obsessed with categorizing everything—plants, bugs, rocks, and eventually, people.
Carl Linnaeus is the guy who gave us the system for naming animals (Homo sapiens). But in 1735, he decided to split humans into four varieties: Americanus, Europeus, Asiaticus, and Afer. He didn't just describe them; he assigned personality traits to them. He claimed Europeans were "gentle" and "inventive," while Africans were "crafty" and "negligent."
There was no data for this. He just felt it was true.
Then came Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. In 1775, he came up with the five-race model: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay. He actually coined the term "Caucasian" because he thought people from the Caucasus Mountains were the most beautiful. It was literally a beauty pageant disguised as science.
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The Virginia Influence
In the American colonies, racism was a practical legislative tool. In the early 1600s, "indentured servants" included both poor whites and Africans. They worked together. Sometimes they ran away together. They even revolted together during Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676.
The wealthy elite realized this was a massive threat. If the poor united, the rich were in trouble.
So, they passed laws to drive a wedge between them. They started giving "white" servants small privileges while stripping rights away from Africans. They made slavery a permanent, hereditary status tied to skin color. By the time Thomas Jefferson was writing about "all men are created equal," he was also writing Notes on the State of Virginia, where he speculated that Black people were inferior in both body and mind.
He had to believe that. Otherwise, his lifestyle—built on the labor of enslaved people—would be a moral catastrophe he couldn't live with.
Statistics and the Weight of History
Racism isn't just a "bad feeling" someone has. It became baked into the systems. By the 19th and 20th centuries, "scientific racism" was used to justify everything from the Jim Crow laws in the U.S. to the Holocaust in Europe and Apartheid in South Africa.
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Consider the impact of these systems over time:
- In the United States, the median wealth of a white household in 2022 was roughly $285,000, while for Black households, it was around $45,000. That’s a gap created not by "hard work," but by decades of redlining and exclusion from the GI Bill.
- Medical racism persists too. Studies show that Black patients are still significantly less likely to receive pain medication than white patients for the same injuries because of lingering, false 19th-century beliefs that Black people have "thicker skin" or higher pain tolerances.
Acknowledging the Nuance
It is worth noting that some scholars argue over the exact "start" date. Some see seeds of it in the Crusades. Others, like Ibram X. Kendi in Stamped from the Beginning, argue that racist ideas were created to justify racist policies, not the other way around.
The distinction matters. If racism is a natural instinct, we're stuck with it. If it's a historical invention—a tool created for profit and power—we can actually take it apart.
Basically, humans are hardwired for "tribalism," but "race" is the specific tribe we were told to care about so that a few people could get very, very rich off the labor of others.
Actionable Steps for Understanding and Growth
If you want to move past the simplified version of history we get in school, start here:
Read the primary sources. Don't just take a textbook's word for it. Read the 1662 Virginia Hereditary Slave Law. Read Linnaeus’s descriptions in Systema Naturae. Seeing the language of "inventing" race makes it much harder to view it as a natural reality.
Audit your media diet. The "science" of the 1800s still influences how we see people today. Notice how often "intelligence" or "criminality" is subtly tied to race in modern news or entertainment. Once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it.
Support institutional transparency. Look into how your local city was zoned. Most "bad neighborhoods" aren't accidental; they were created by 1930s federal "redlining" maps that marked Black neighborhoods as "hazardous" for investment. Understanding the local history of your own town is the fastest way to see how "when racism began" still impacts where you live today.
Acknowledge the discomfort. Learning that race is a "social construct" doesn't mean it isn't real. It’s very real in its consequences. But knowing it was built means it can be unbuilt. This isn't about guilt; it's about accuracy. Knowing the real timeline of racism allows you to engage with the world as it actually is, rather than how we've been told it must be.