Colonial model of racism
The colonial model of racism emerged during the European colonization that began in the fifteenth century, characterized by varying assumptions and practices among different colonial powers. This model reflects a spectrum of racial attitudes and hierarchies, with countries like Britain and France adopting distinct approaches. The British maintained a rigid separation between themselves and Indigenous populations, fostering a sense of racial superiority, particularly evident in British India where Indigenous soldiers were segregated from British forces. In contrast, the French viewed their role as civilizers, suggesting cultural superiority rather than racial, promoting assimilation through the concept of the *évolué*—a culturally assimilated Indigenous individual.
Other colonial powers, such as Belgium and Portugal, implemented harsher, exploitative systems that dehumanized Indigenous peoples, equating them to labor animals and measuring their worth by skin color. This led to pronounced social hierarchies, particularly in Brazil, where skin color significantly influences social status. Across these varying colonial models, a common theme is the perception of colonized peoples as the "other," which played a critical role in defining European identity. Although decolonization has freed many Indigenous populations from direct colonial rule, the legacy of colonial racism endures, influencing cultural identity and social dynamics in contemporary societies.
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Colonial model of racism
As various European powers colonized the globe beginning in the fifteenth century, their agents encountered cultural groups with ways of life markedly different from their own. The images of other peoples available in the accounts of merchants and travelers acquired a concrete reality as Europeans, aided by advances in navigation and military technology, went out to explore and conquer the world.
It is more appropriate to speak of multiple colonial models of racism than of a single model because each of the colonizing powers brought different assumptions and practices to the enterprise. Britain adopted the policy of informal empire, whereby Indigenous chiefs or rulers continued in power under the tutelage of British colonial administrators. Although Indigenous peoples might occupy positions within the British administration or army after suitable education or training, a rigid distinction between the British and Indigenous peoples existed. In British India, for instance, the sepoys, or Indian soldiers, were segregated both administratively and personally from the British regulars, whose relations with the Indigenous peoples were typically characterized by aloofness founded upon a sense of racial and cultural superiority.
Like the British, the French asserted their assumed superiority over Indigenous peoples. They saw themselves as civilizers who had come to elevate Africans and Asians to their own level of culture. The French, however, conceived their superiority primarily in cultural rather than racial terms. The evolué, the Indigenous person who had assimilated to French standards of culture that entitled them to formal equality with citizens of metropolitan France, had no counterpart in the regimes of other colonial powers.
Other imperial nations, such as Belgium and Portugal, implemented harsh, exploitative regimes that likened other races to beasts of burden for use in railroad construction, mining, and other economic activities. For the Belgians and the Portuguese, skin color supplied an index of social worth. Brazil, a former Portuguese colony, illustrates the legacy of the colonial model of racism through its social hierarchy: The correlation between lightness and darkness of skin and social position is nowhere else so pronounced. Racial conflict is also more severe in Brazil than in the contemporary United States.
The common element in these various approaches to colonial peoples was a conception of them as the “other,” fundamentally different from Europeans. In fact, it was the African and Asian “other” who helped to define the European “self.” Europeans gained a clearer sense of their own identity by the juxtaposition of the “White” with the “Black” and the “Yellow” races. Though the process of decolonization has freed African and Asian peoples from domination by colonial powers, the impact of forced diffusion and assimilation of Western ways of life remains. When the president of a West African nation wears a Western-style business suit instead of a traditional dashiki shirt with dress trousers, his choice is evidence of historical patterns of interaction whereby colonists defined traditional attire as immodest and “savage.” The colonial model of racism was a crucial factor in the movement from contact to conquest.
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