At the same time as a standard definition of racism crystallised, two major debates developed in parallel. The first concerned the relationship between 'racism' and 'anti-Semitism', the second the circumstances in which modern 'racism' merged. While the former debate is far from over, a relative consensus reigns in the latter case, situating its emergence at the end of the fifteenth century at the moment of the 'discovery' of the Americas. This was indeed the point of departure of the Europeanisation of the world, but also the beginning of the formation of absolute monarchies (embryos of the nation-state), the secularisation of anti-Semitism and the domestication of the aristocracies who developed the ideology of 'the purity of the blood'.
I am tempted to draw a methodological lesson from the current debate around the notion of 'racism'. Historically, there is no one racism that appeared in the West in a given moment and must at some other moment disappear. There are many successive ideological configurations of racism, closely linked to the conflicts among cultures and violent political practices (in particular, state violence). Each of these configurations expresses the tensions, the antagonisms internal to a great endeavour of universal domination: whether that be the Roman Empire, Christianity, European expansion, nationalisms, the world market, or tomorrow, perhaps, the 'new world order'.
Each of them leaves a trace that contributes to the composition of a new 'racism', which is always, then, a 'neo-racism'. Thus we have passed from theological anti-Judaism to secular anti-Semitism, from biological racism to cultural racism, from colonial violence to post-colonial discrimination against the peoples of the 'South', among other cases. Like it or not, this is without a doubt testimony to the fact that schemas of domination, discrimination and domestic exclusion are powerful instruments of identification – of the self and of others – and, therefore, of historical and collective memory.
Ultimately, the ambivalences and theoretical weaknesses of anti-racism obviously do not raise any doubts over its necessity. Just as the fluctuations of the racist discourse legitimising discrimination and segregation cannot mask the analogy among all such practices, the continuity of anti-racism is in each epoch founded on the awareness of racism's incompatibility with freedom, as well as of the intolerable denial of humanity inherent within it.”
― Etienne Balibar, Racists and anti-racists
