The Invention of Racism in Classical AntiquityThere was racism in the ancient world, after all. This groundbreaking book refutes the common belief that the ancient Greeks and Romans harbored "ethnic and cultural," but not racial, prejudice. It does so by comprehensively tracing the intellectual origins of racism back to classical antiquity. Benjamin Isaac's systematic analysis of ancient social prejudices and stereotypes reveals that some of those represent prototypes of racism--or proto-racism--which in turn inspired the early modern authors who developed the more familiar racist ideas. He considers the literature from classical Greece to late antiquity in a quest for the various forms of the discriminatory stereotypes and social hatred that have played such an important role in recent history and continue to do so in modern society. |
From inside the book
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... appear in the Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ) of 1910. 1 The term racial- ism has been around a little longer : It ... appears to me to be the greatest results of the Botha - Smuts government are the abolition of racial- ism and the ...
... appear until the trans - Atlantic voyages of the Renaissance . " Naturally , in the United States , those who discuss racism tend to focus on skin color . The article continues : " Another way of thinking about skin color is to ask ...
... appears not to be the case . It may be seen that there is 12 Uffe Øystergård , ' What is National and Ethnic Identity ? ' in Bilde et al . , Ethnicity in Hellenistic Egypt ( 1992 ) , 16-38 , esp . 35f . also suggests that this might be ...
... appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in colour . " Finally , Kant asserts that " The tallest and most beautiful people on dry land are on the parallel and the degrees which run through Germany . " 26 This follows the ...
... appear- ance . These are almost always the subject of racist views . Thus it would deny the qualification of racism to claims that a certain people has a distinctive smell or an ugly skull , for instance , since these are not forms of ...