Why Do We Need a Long History of Race?

When The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages was published in 2018-and, before that, when I published a two-part article of the same title in Literature Compass in 2011-race theorists and premodernists had to be actively persuaded that phenomena and practices identified today as race and racialization were palpable in the European Middle Ages, long before the modern eras.To begin the conversation, I offered a simple, stripped-down working hypothesis: that race is one of the primary names we have-a name we retain for the epistemological, ethical, and political commitments it recognizes-for a repeating tendency, of the gravest import, to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups.Racial formation thus occurs as specific historical occasions where strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned, through a variety of practices and pressures, so as to construct a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment.