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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... believed , were ethnic or cultural , not racial . In this book I shall argue that early forms of racism , to be called proto - racism , were common in the Graeco - Roman world . My second point in this connection is that those early ...
... believed in monogenesis , in the unity of mankind . This had been the traditional starting point for all those who accepted the truth of the Bible . Buffon was not religious , but accepted the fact that all human beings can procreate ...
... believed in polygenesis . Being an unbeliever and ignorant of the bio- logical evidence available in his time , he had no difficulty in rejecting the unity of mankind . The different races which he distinguished therefore did not have a ...
... believed to share imagined physical , mental , and moral attributes with the group to which they are deemed to belong , and it is assumed that they cannot change these traits individually . This is held to be impossible , because these ...
... believed possible to classify human beings on the basis of physiologi- cal traits , on the assumption that certain groups possess hereditary traits that are sufficiently constant to characterize them as distinct human types . In ...