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Race Is about Politics - Lessons from History (Hardcover)
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Race Is about Politics - Lessons from History (Hardcover)
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How the history of racism without visible differences between
people challenges our understanding of the history of racial
thinking Racial divisions have returned to the forefront of
politics in the United States and European societies, making it
more important than ever to understand race and racism. But do we?
In this original and provocative book, acclaimed historian
Jean-Frederic Schaub shows that we don't-and that we need to
rethink the widespread assumption that racism is essentially a
modern form of discrimination based on skin color and other visible
differences. On the contrary, Schaub argues that to understand
racism we must look at historical episodes of collective
discrimination where there was no visible difference between
people. Built around notions of identity and otherness, race is
above all a political tool that must be understood in the context
of its historical origins. Although scholars agree that races don't
exist except as ideological constructions, they disagree about when
these ideologies emerged. Drawing on historical research from the
early modern period to today, Schaub makes the case that the key
turning point in the political history of race in the West occurred
not with the Atlantic slave trade and American slavery, as many
historians have argued, but much earlier, in fifteenth-century
Spain and Portugal, with the racialization of Christians of Jewish
and Muslim origin. These Christians were discriminated against
under the new idea that they had negative social and moral traits
that were passed from generation to generation through blood,
semen, or milk-an idea whose legacy has persisted through the age
of empires to today. Challenging widespread definitions of race and
offering a new chronology of racial thinking, Schaub shows why race
must always be understood in the context of its political history.
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