I'm only writing in the context of my OP, and I meant the former. Jesus and Paul were not racist, and neither was Peter.
That's a bit of a red herring then....since the concept of race as we know it didn't exist back then.
You could literally say the same of everyone from Jesus's time.
Ok. I see I'm being to general here. Let's just talk "ideals" or "essential principles" that may be inherent to and help to strongly drive an ideology, such as racism....such as the idea that White folks are somehow 'better' than folks of any other ethnicity. Is that better?
Lol not really...
Is there some examples of this outside of the membership of a handful of white supremacist groups?
Are those groups what you've been talking about the entire time? Because I honestly thought you were referring to a much more widespread type of racism.
You're forgetting something; we're talking about the history of various ideological (even religious) developments that have formerly shaped social patterns in the U.S. over the past 400 years.
You seem like you're digging for a very specific answer here...I just don't know what it is.
It's not as if there's some mystery as to the origin of the ideas regarding race....it just doesn't have much (if anything) to do with racism today.
The short version is it all goes back to Enlightenment era Europeans and the changes in worldview they were going through culturally....while at the same time expanding across the globe. Basically ,for millennia, all nations and cultures had supernatural/mystical explanations for why their in-group was better than a particular out-group. Explanations like "
they have sex with animals....worship demons....drink blood....etc". Explanations not born from facts....but from superstition and myth.
Enlightenment Europeans however, were increasingly convinced that rational, natural, fact based explanations existed for
everything. When crossing the globe in search of exotic foreign lands with cities of gold was met with the reality of culture after culture that seemed stuck in the past, primitive, or otherwise unsophisticated....natural, rational explanations were sought. The commonality between the people of these various cultures was that they were of different skin tones than Europeans....although consistently darker. Thus, the concept of "race" was more or less born. Things were added and subtracted from the concept of race over time....with some aspects lingering on into even the mid-late 1900s. However as science kept disproving these aspects over time, and understanding of genetics increased, race eventually fell out of the realm of science and is now understood to be a strictly social distinction.
That's how it happened....that's where it comes from. Does that make sense?