I had a discussion about this in another sub and I and some others defend that ethnic discrimination already exists in all world, but race as a concept only start to exist in Colonial Americas. While others were saying that this is semantics and that some discrimination that existed, especially in East Asia, would also be considered racism that doesn't have correlation with Europe and their colonial endeavors.
Who were right? Racism is a thing that start to exist after Colonial Americas or this is just semantics and other ethnic discrimination can also be considered racism?
I can answer this from the point of view of United States history.
This is not a matter of semantics. Race specifically refers to a (now defunct) anthropological theory of classifying human cultures based on their physical characteristics.
The American Anthropological Asociation's statement on race mentions this:
Today scholars in many fields argue that "race" as it is understood in the United States of America was a social mechanism invented during the 18th century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: the English and other European settlers, the conquered Indian peoples, and those peoples of Africa brought in to provide slave labor.
From its inception, this modern concept of "race" was modeled after an ancient theorem of the Great Chain of Being, which posited natural categories on a hierarchy established by God or nature. Thus "race" was a mode of classification linked specifically to peoples in the colonial situation. It subsumed a growing ideology of inequality devised to rationalize European attitudes and treatment of the conquered and enslaved peoples. Proponents of slavery in particular during the 19th century used "race" to justify the retention of slavery. The ideology magnified the differences among Europeans, Africans, and Indians, established a rigid hierarchy of socially exclusive categories underscored and bolstered unequal rank and status differences, and provided the rationalization that the inequality was natural or God-given. The different physical traits of African-Americans and Indians became markers or symbols of their status differences.
Before the colonial era discrimination was usually based more on culture than racial theories. Think about the language you spoke, your religion, class, etc. There are not zero examples of someone being discriminated against based on their physical characteristics before the scientific theory of racism, but the fact is humans were not specifically grouped into monolithic races. There was no theory of a single "Caucasian/African/Asian/Indian people" with the same skin color, face structure, hair texture, etc. loosely backed by empirical evidence.
In fact, in early colonial America, the question of whether you were a Christian or not mattered more than race for your status in society, and racism largely rose out of a new need to justify the oppression of groups such as African slaves which eventually became Christianized themselves. It was rare, but not impossible, for Christian Africans to gain high status among Europeans during the 16th and 17th centuries before racist scientific theories became dominant in politics.
In all racism as we know it today did not exist, because racism refers specifically to a now invalid anthropological theory that humans should be classified based on different physical characteristics (rather than culture), which arose out of 18th-century European science.
Sources:
Foner, Philip Sheldon. 1975. History of Black Americans: From Africa to the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Guest, Kenneth J. 2017. Cultural Anthropology - A Reader for a Global Age. New York, NY: WW Norton.
“AAA Statement on Race.” American Anthropological Association. https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=2583.