Proto-racism
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Attitudes and actions displaying prejudices and stereotypes analogous to those of racism which predate the modern biologically-based concept of race. countable, uncountable
"While these mainly focused on the relationship with Jews and Jewish conversos, other historians envisioned Iberian contribution to racism as the elaboration and distillation of Muslim proto-racism that gradually distinguished Africans from >whites< and that, even before the beginning of the Atlantic slave-trade, attributed different characteristics to the members of each cluster."
Example
More examples"While these mainly focused on the relationship with Jews and Jewish conversos, other historians envisioned Iberian contribution to racism as the elaboration and distillation of Muslim proto-racism that gradually distinguished Africans from >whites< and that, even before the beginning of the Atlantic slave-trade, attributed different characteristics to the members of each cluster."
Etymology
From proto- + racism.
More for "proto-racism"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.