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I don't know whether phenotype-based tribalism was a thing before 18th-century Western racism (I suspect it was in China, at least), but it wasn't the main thing. Our very word for a tribal membership test (shibboleth) is a reminder that the OT Jews (who were a tribe defined by common genetic descent) nevertheless used diction and not appearance as the practical sorting algorithm. There is an ongoing argument about how many "Aethiopians" (actual Sub-Saharan Black Africans, as opposed to "Africans" who were whitish North Africans) there were in the Roman Empire, but the number was a lot greater than zero, and they were seen as just as Roman as anyone else who ate garum and aspired to own and wear a toga.
In the Middle Ages in Europe, religion-based tribalism trumped phenotype-based tribalism. When the Crusaders established contact with Christian Ethiopia, they didn't think "Black and heretic - must be outgroup". They thought they had found the lost kingdom of Prester John and immediately sought an alliance.
There is always a mix of factors influencing how tribal lines get drawn. However, I think there's evidence that phenotype-based tribalism is very old, challenging the idea that race thinking developed in the modern West. And it's not just China that did this, there's other pre-modern societies where racial prejudices are evident.
For example, the medieval Arabs had a phenotypic race classification, and seemed to have quite a negative view of African blacks (having enslaved a lot of them).
"Many medieval Arabic texts categorise people phenotypically into three types of skin-colour: white (al-bīḍān, 'the white ones' associated particularly with Arabs), red (associated particularly with Romans, or Europeans more generally), and black (al-sūdān 'the black ones', associated particularly with darker complexioned Africans)."
"[E]thnocentric prejudice towards black people is widely evident among medieval Arabs, for a variety of reasons. ... [I]n the Islamic period, dark-skinned Africans in the Arabian Peninsula and elsewhere in Caliphate tended to be slaves. For example, al-Ṭabarī estimated that in Southern Basra alone there were around 15,000 around the 870s.[6]: 122 This situation encouraged Arabs to view themselves as superior to Black people, not least as a mechanism for Arabs to justify the enslavement of others.[6]: 98–101 For example, Ibn Buṭlān composed a noted, stereotyping description of the qualities of slaves of different races, which is relatively positive about Nubians, but otherwise particularly negative about the characteristics of Black people.[7]: 108, 122–23 These negative characteristics included the idea that black men were sexually voracious; thus the most recurrent stereotype of black people in the Thousand and One Nights is the black male slave fornicating with a white woman,[12] while the Egyptian historian al-Abshibi (d. 1446) wrote that "[i]t is said that when the [black] slave is sated, he fornicates, when he is hungry, he steals."[13] Allegedly, such was his distrust of Black people, Abu Muslim al-Khurasani massacred four thousand of his own Black soldiers after completing the Abbasid Revolution.[6]: 122 Abuse of phenotypical features associated with Black African people is found even in the poems composed by al-Mutanabbī (d. 965) in both praise and criticism of the Black vizier of Egypt Abū al-Misk Kāfur (d. 968), which variously seek either to excuse or to lambast Kāfur for his colour and heritage."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Arab_attitudes_to_Black_people
Of course when it comes to things that far back, there's often a problem with simple lack of documentation. And there's also a lack of drive or motivation to assess historical racism perpetrated by non-Westerners (because it can't be slotted into the woke worldview, and because they believe acknowledging this would shift a portion of the blame off the people they would like to scapegoat for the social ills they denounce). But the evidence that we do have seems to suggest that phenotypic tribalism was very much a thing long before the time that the social constructionists believe white Westerners to have "created" or "popularised" racism.
The 9th and 10th century attitudes you quote weren't just a Dark Ages fluke, either. Look at Ibn Khaldun, 14th century. Wikipedia still calls him "one of the greatest social scientists of the Middle Ages", but Wikiquote reveals that some of his social "science" was ... not so great.
From your link:
"The only people who accept slavery are the Negroes, owing to their low degree of humanity and proximity to the animal stage. Other persons who accept the status of slave do so as a means of attaining high rank, or power, or wealth, as is the case with the Mameluke Turks in the East and with those Franks and Galicians who enter the service of the state [in Spain]."
And this from an Arab who lived long before the 18th century.
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