# Race is a fiction a mere figment of our imagination. Yet, race is so incorporated into reality until it is impossible to differentiate between what is real and what is not. It is also a large part of history. The term race, meaning any distinct group of people#, becomes a word of prejudice in the seventeenth century, during colonization. Louis Ruchames argues that fact by stating "Racial thought is as old as civilized man."# Although racial thought according to Ruchames could be explained as modern racism between the races as it was, only decades ago. Even modern day author Audrey Smedley points out that, "it is not without significance that many contemporary scholars have concluded that race is a relatively recent concept in human history" (Smedley 1999, 16). Dante Puzzo (1964) also contributed to the argument by stating that "Racism is a modern conception, for prior to the XVIth [16th] century there was virtually nothing in the life and thought of the west that can be described as racist" (579) (Smedley 1999, 16). It can also be argued that racial thought extended even far beyond modernized racism. There is evidence of this when we see that "racial thought was used to explain differences between economic and social classes, especially between the peasantry and the nobility" during the Middle Ages.# From the passage it is evident that racial thought was around even before American colonization. Although, during colonization is when skin color had a large part in establishing Negro discrimination because the colonist saw the Negro "as an inferior being fit only for slavery."# Carl Degler would argue that Negro discrimination began before colonization saying, "that discrimination against the Negro existed before slavery, [and] existed indeed from the very beginning of settlement."# Degler's analysis of Negro discrimination continued with an explanation saying, "Thus, legal slavery in the English colonies reinforced and helped to perpetuate the discrimination against the Negro which prevailed almost from the beginning of settlement.
