Ask the Scholars

I think of course, it depends on how you define race. If you're talking about us and them, the attitude of hostility to people we find different, we can find manifestations of that on different grounds throughout history. The word xenophobia, for example, fear of the stranger, is a Greek word which certainly is almost a universal human phenomenon. I think race comes when there's a sense of innate or unbridgeable difference, and that, in my opinion, develops not really in the United State...

I think it's important to point out that people of all so-called races have been enslaved. The entire experience of slavery from Greek and Roman times on, from Egyptian times on, indicates that any population that was vulnerable could be enslaved. In these instances, race had nothing to do with slavery. As we've said elsewhere, the concept of race as we know it simply didn't exist. I've found that people often confuse slavery and race in the Western World and in America. Yet the word sla...

Race has also been used in a variety of ways that today we would have a hard time understanding. For example, the Irish were seen by the English as a separate race. I think many of us know that, especially during the Second World War period and before, Jewish people were often referred to as part of the Jewish race. In this way, the term race, by today's standards, was used very loosely to define the other, which is different from how we think of it today.

As Audrey mentioned, in...