Creating a Monster: The Race Concept

Reading the "Race"  section of the Encyclopedia of Social history gave me new insight to a topic which I had typically focused on beginning with Slavery.  I had assumed that the concept of race had always been in existence.  Perhaps this is because of the idea that people tend to focus on differences that I believed this to be true without much of a second thought.   However, this article gave me a much better, broader, more accurate idea of the concept of race throughout world history- not only the past 200 years in the United States.   The fact that the term "race"  wasn't really coined to describe people of different appearances and cultures until approximately 1400 came as a bit of a surprise.   Race then, as an idea, developed rather out of convenience of description than from an innate sense of "racism."  (I know, using the same word I am trying to describe as the describing word....fail, but it lends the appropriate connotation to what I am trying to say.)   Indeed, as the article writes, "It soon became common throughout much of Europe to portray one of the three Wise Men...as a pious and wealthy African...often depicted with an emblem of Africa near him, such as a camel or a chimpanzee"(439).  In this case, what began as a simple means of description, and even lauding of the splendor of African kings, became translated into images and crude references of animals, leading eventually to the horrors we know as American slavery and the discrimination that continues to persist today.  I was very happily engaged in this article that showed very clearly how very many factors contributed to the development of race and racism.  It is not a concept which was inbred into society, but rather, grew and prospered via a snowball effect, borne on the backs of language, conquest, religious warfare, and misguided science.   It is amazing how, what once begins in innocence or ignorance can spawn such monstrous effects as the word, "race."