Racism, according to the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, is based on the exacerbation of

the racial sense of an ethnic group that usually motivates discrimination or persecution of another
or others with whom it lives. The word "racism" also designates the anthropological doctrine or
the political ideology based on that sentiment.123 In accordance with the International
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination approved by the General
Assembly of the Organization of United Nations on December 21, 1965: There are authors who
propose to distinguish between racism in the broad sense of racism in the narrow sense. In the
first case, it would be an ethnocentric or "sociocentric" attitude that separates one's own group
from that of another, and that considers that both are constituted by hereditary and immutable
essences that make the others, the foreigners, inadmissible and threatening beings. This
conception of others would lead to their segregation, discrimination, expulsion or extermination
and could be based on scientific or religious ideas or on mere legends or traditional sentiments. It
also affirms the intellectual and moral superiority of some races over others, a superiority that is
maintained by racial purity and is ruined by miscegenation. This type of racism, whose model is
the Nazi and Western racism in general, leads to defend the natural right of the "superior" races to
impose themselves on the "inferior". that affirms the hereditary biological determination of the
intellectual and moral capacities of the individual, and the division of human groups into races,
differentiated by physical characters associated with intellectual and moral, hereditary and
immutable.

Granting or withholding rights or privileges based on race or refusing to associate with people
because of their race is known as racial discrimination.

Racist attitudes, values and systems openly or covertly establish a hierarchical order among ethnic
or racial groups, used to justify the privileges or advantages enjoyed by the dominant group.

Buraschi and Aguilar (2019) define racism as "a system of domination and inferiorization of one
group over another based on the racialization of differences, in which interpersonal, institutional
and cultural dimensions are articulated. It is expressed through a set of ideas, discourses and
practices of invisibility, stigmatization, discrimination, exclusion, exploitation, aggression and
dispossession”.7

To combat racism, the United Nations Organization adopted the International Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1965 and established March 21 as the
International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

In 2004, the Israeli historian Benjamin Isaac published the book The invention of Racism in
Classical Antiquity, which sparked great controversy because in it he stated that, although "racism
did not exist in classical antiquity, under the modern form of biological determinism", « certain
characteristic features of racism are already found in the texts of ancient literature, and the
readings that have been made of them in subsequent periods of Western history have conferred
on them, in different forms, an influence that should not be overlooked» Isaac claimed the
existence of "pre-modern racist thought" among the ancient Greeks and Romans so that the
"genealogy" of racism in the West could be "traced" back to "classical antiquity".

Among the "characteristic features of racism [that] are already found in the texts of ancient
literature", Isaac has pointed to the widely accepted environmental determinism from the middle
of the fifth century BC. and that it was developed by Aristotle in the following century in his
Politics.11 According to Aristotle the ideal environment in which the Greeks lived predisposed
them to govern the peoples less favored by nature.12 However, as Maurice has highlighted Sartre,
the theories that the Greeks and Romans developed to justify domination over other peoples,
«never led to policies of extermination, nor of deliberate exclusion. Quite the contrary! The Greeks
and the Romans very widely allowed the integration of the “barbarians”».13

Christianity brought a new concept, universalism, until then alien to Antiquity as it was considered
the true religion of all humanity. In this way the division between Greeks/Romans and
«barbarians», typical of Antiquity, was replaced by the differentiation between those who were
already part of the Christian community, the baptized, and «those not yet Christians» (pagans). 20
A special group was made up of the Jews since they were the cradle of the Christian religion and
therefore they were not persecuted, but only "carried away" that they were not tolerated, as the
pogroms that they suffered above all from the fourteenth century would demonstrate. The
unknown regions of the Earth in the imaginary of the medieval West appeared populated by
fabulous beings not destined for salvation. "A racist dimension can hardly be perceived in this
worldview," said Christian Geulen, who adds that in terms of "medieval political conflicts, one can
hardly speak of recognizable racist motives."21

On the other hand, in medieval Islam the curse of Ham, conveniently reworked, was used to justify
the enslavement of blacks by pointing them out as the descendants of Ham who, according to the
biblical story, had mocked his father Noah when he found him drunk and naked and furious Noah
had cursed Ham's son, Canaan, to be "to his brothers the slave of slaves." In the Bible nothing was
said about the color of Ham's skin (in reality it was about justifying the slavery of the Canaanites,
the great enemies of Israel), but in the third century the father of the Church Origen added
prejudice to the curse of the skin by affirming that the sons of Ham were doomed to a degrading
life marked by darkness (in the spiritual sense) and associated the Ethiopians, descendants of the
cursed son of Noah, with blacks. In the High Middle Ages the Ethiopians will be considered the
spirit of evil that opposes that of the angel. However, it will be the great Arab scholar Al-Tabari
who in the 10th century clearly stated that the curse of Ham had brought about the blackening of
his skin so that his descendants were the blacks who were condemned to slavery. 22