35 Human Rights Commission A history of racism The social construct of race Race is not a biological fact (Sullivan, 2006, p. 18). Race is a social construct fabricated by white society to structure and divide society on the presumption of white supremacy (Mirzoeff, 2009, p. 147; Calmore, 1995, p. 318; Hall, 2002, p. 40; Mills, 2011; see also Bailey and Zita, 2007; Buck, 2012; Crenshaw, 1995; Dua, 2008; Elder, Wolch & Emel, 1998; Filax, 2008; Green, 2008; Lund, 2008; Mane, 2012; Ortega, 2006; Oyewumi, 2000; Rodriquez, 2006; Smith, 2008a, 2008b; Sullivan and Tuana, 2007; Thompson and Thompson, 2008; Essed and Goldberg, 2002). Christianity ‘Race’, however, has a distinct historical trajectory of its own. As a European-centric way of understanding human society, it emerged out of a particular sociohistorical context in early Latin-Christian Europe, some five hundred years ago. This was a world dominated by the Church, where ‘to be human’ meant ‘to be Christian’. In the early Church-dominated colonial world, God sat atop a chain of being with humans descending hierarchically below ‘from civilised to savage’ (Salmond, 2020, p. 35). Europeans were pure. ‘Heathens’, ‘nonbelievers’, and nonChristians were subhuman ‘others’, ‘sinful by nature’, and to be treated as such (Wynter, 2003, pp. 263-4). Colonisation caused the introduction and application of colonial racism and white supremacy. Papal Bulls like the Dum Diversas (1452), which encouraged the conversion of new peoples to Christianity, also justified their enslavement or destruction as ‘the enemies of Christ’ and sowed the seedbed of a new oppressive doctrine-endorsed racism and white supremacy (Taonui, 2021). 4. An observable physical or biochemical characteristic caused by genetic makeup or environmental influences. Race theory Increasingly sophisticated race-based theoretical ideas emerged as Western colonisation expanded across the globe. In part, because the Renaissance colonial mercantile class and its intelligentsia sought to escape the strictures of the Church. Equally, if not more, it was because the scale of colonisation, the wealth at stake, and the destruction colonisation wreaked in new worlds required greater levels of secular justification and legitimacy. The new sciences of racism rested on multiple assumptions. For example, white ‘European man’ had arisen from a ‘state of nature’ (see Mills, 2011, p. 12) to become white ‘rational, thinking man’. Non-European peoples, on the other hand, were locked to nature, non-white and therefore irrational childlike beings (Wynter, 2003, p. 300; Mills, 2011, p. 11, Norris, 2020, p. 1). During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century Enlightenment, new hierarchical models appeared based on an evolutionary progression of human society from barbarism to civilisation (Hall, 1997, p. 239; see also Jolly, 2009, p. 74). New secularised definitions arose alongside, or in place of, religion, where phenotypical4, genealogical and cultural variation became the essential signifiers of difference (Wynter 2003, p. 263;). For European society, white people were evolutionarily advanced, non-whites were backwards. Whites were superior, ‘others’ were inferior. White culture was civilised, non-whiteness backwards. Physical features, culture, modes of dress and customs, of which skin colour was paramount, were the visual representation of this binary of superior and inferior. To advance to being rational, civilised and superior was to become white. To fail in the face of vast white power oppression was confirmation of the weakness and inadequacy of