Rather there was a sustained campaign to emphasise racial difference, on the part of elites, that was fiercely contested. Racial difference was a component in pro-slave ideology, argued by those with an interest in it, but challenged by its many opponents - such as the mass anti-slavery movement in Britain, and in north America. During the American Civil War, Manchester cotton workers organised opposition to the pro-southern propaganda put out by their employers, and the Manchester Guardian newspaper. In its primitive stages, racial ideology, as Kenan Malik has pointed out, was directed against not just people of colour, but the lower orders generally, only later becoming finessed into a colour bar. Peter Linebaugh describes the bonds between sailors of all races against the admiralty that sought to divide them on race lines.
In the 1880s, racial ideology became a core component of (what was then called) the 'new imperialism', the colonial conquest of Africa. Even then, there was fierce resistance to the idea. William Morris organised a 'Troops out of Omdurman' demonstration that drew thousands. In Germany, the NSDAP did not happen on the idea of anti-Semitism, but actively promoted it, as the other reactionary parties that they displaced had, as a direct assault on the parties of the left, who had a large Jewish following, Racial prejudice against Jews was by no means a simple reaction to the differences between the races, but a sustained campaign to divide the popular movement of the left and to misdirect anti-capitalist sentiments.
Racial prejudice has a history, and it is a history that was contested fiercely. Far from being the case that the idea was a spontaneous reflection of actual difference, the promotion of racial division as a fact, ran alongside the promotion of the idea of racial difference. Racism is not just error, it is an ideology whose generation was associated with reactionary political movements.
Chris Doss writes:
"Just pointing out that racism (x population group is significanlt different from y population group for biological reasons) is not morally wrong, but factually wrong. If it were actually the case that e.g. Africans had an average IQ of 70 while Europeans have one of 100, and this was inherited biologically, racism would be correct. There was no way for somebody in say 1750 to know that this was not true, and so for them racism was a perfectly acceptable theory to explain the obvious differences in technological development between Europeans and Africans."