I'm looking for some more information about something I dimly remember learning in college. As it was explained to me, the kind of bigotry against non-whites that we think of as racism today is a direct outgrowth of the arguments that Europeans used during the colonial period to justify eradicating and enslaving "savages". In essence, the argument was that modern racism (if that's even the right term) is an effect of the colonial period and the slave trade, rather than a cause of it.

Is this a generally accepted view, and can any experts elaborate further on this stuff for me?