Deconstructing The Colonial Narratives Surrounding Migration — Part 2
A Short Essay On The Origins Of Whiteness And White Supremacy
In order to understand whiteness, one has to tackle Aristotelian dualism.
Aristotle is an ancient Athenian philosopher who has theorized the concept of “masters” (who could accidentally fall in slavery) and “natural slaves”, a dyadic perception of the world that will hegemonically condition the western philosophy for centuries to come.
Everything from the Greek city-states to the Roman empire will function on a binarist scheme: citizens vs barbarians, men vs women, masters vs slaves, dominant vs dominated etc. and will ultimately lead to the foundations of the European modern thought starting what’s commonly known as the “Renaissance”.
But nor Aristotle nor any of the European philosophers who explored his dyadic concept of masters/slaves (Kant in his Dialectic or Nietzsche in his Genealogy of Morals) have attributed ethnic origins or skin color to these categories, so where does the ethnic hierarchisation come from?
Whiteness as a (germanic) tribal blood-based structure of domination
The first historical references of some kind of (proto) ethnic profiling and skin-based hierarchisation seem to…
