Meaning of proto-racist | Babel Free

Definitions

Characteristic of proto-racism.

Examples

“Racist doctrines were not fully utilized to justify slavery in the Americas until the nineteenth century (though proto-racist ideas were so employed in the previous two centuries), in part because slavery was not thought to require a moral justification, and in part because the concept of "race" had not been fully developed.”

“Hannaford insists that later thinkers from the Renaissance onwards selected bits from Greek texts that fitted with their ideas about race, thus casting thinkers such as Aristotle and Plato as proto-racist and misunderstanding the real character of Greek ideas.”

“From this perspective, although the Greeks and Romans did not embark on the kind of institutionalised racism that was commonplace in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, proto-racist ideas did exist in Greco-Roman texts.”

CEFR level