proto-racism

noun

Attitudes and actions displaying prejudices and stereotypes analogous to those of racism which predate the modern biologically-based concept of race.

Meanings

nounproto-racism (countable and uncountable, plural proto-racisms)

plural proto-racisms · alternative protoracism

  1. countableuncountableAttitudes and actions displaying prejudices and stereotypes analogous to those of racism which predate the modern biologically-based concept of race.

    According to this perspective, these ideas already existed in the form of proto-racism and Shakespeare employs the medium of theatre to reinforce and disseminate them.

    2016, Kwesi Tsri, Africans Are Not Black: The case for conceptual liberation, →ISBN
    3 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.

    2012, María Elena Martínez, Max S. Hering Torres, David Nirenberg, Race and Blood in the Iberian World, →ISBN, page 151

    Postmodernity, in Latin America in the I980s, had to do with modernity, from the sixteenth century onward: colonial domination, proto-racisms, the epistemic inferiorization of the non-Western world, the transatlantic capitalist/ mercantile order, and uneven development among other issues.

    2013, James Elkins, Harper Montgomery, Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic, →ISBN, page 48

    Proto-racism is also identified in Roman views of subject peoples, the idea of collective natural slavery was intertwined with patterns of conquest, subjugation and governance.

    2013, Ian Law, Racism and Ethnicity: Global Debates, Dilemmas, Directions, →ISBN

Origin

Translations

German Protorassismus
  • Protorassismusproto-racism
Cite this entry
APA

proto-racism. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/proto-racism

MLA

“proto-racism.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/proto-racism. Accessed November 4, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “proto-racism,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/proto-racism.

Source: proto-racism on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.