Who Invented this Rubbish Called ‘Race’?

Dark Origins and Unscientific Foundations

I was listening to this podcast, Seeing White, about the invention of race, or at least blackness and whiteness. I have many Portuguese friends, and I do not blame them for their adventurer and inventor of dehumanizing people by “race,” Gomes Eanes de Zurara. He was a Portuguese biographer from the 15th century. This weapon of race was the propaganda needed to operationalize the Doctrine of Discovery to justify the enslavement of African people and genocide of indigenous people.

Gomes Eanes de Zurara was a writer around the era of the Portuguese Empire’s expansion into Africa. His work was commissioned and supported by Prince Henry the Navigator, who was at the time a trader of enslaved people. So, Zurara’s contribution to the term “race” was all in support of his boss's wealth hoarding.

Race, as we know it today, is a social construct. It has no basis in biology or genetics. But Zurara, in his ‘Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea,’ crafted a narrative that divided humanity into categories based on skin color and origin. It was a wicked concoction of bigotry, insensibility, and greed for economic gain.

In Zurara’s narrative, Africans were depicted as “others,” as people inherently inferior to Europeans. Really!? This was/is a continent with great resources, kingdoms and civilizations that prospered for milliniums. Why else would Europeans go there for their wealth acquisition. The turned logic on its head with a grand lie that served a purely economic purpose: to justify the enslavement of Africans and the brutal transatlantic slave trade. It was a convenient tool for those who sought to exploit and dehumanize an entire continent for profit.

These were the main products back then. The suffering continues today for the same plus more.

Scientifically speaking, the idea of race is a fantasy. Modern genetics has shown us that the genetic variation within any so-called “racial” group is greater than the variation between groups. In essence, the concept of race is a flawed and arbitrary category that has been used to oppress and discriminate against countless individuals throughout history for profit…