Color coding people

If treatment of Jews provides an early instance of religiously sanctioned and state-imposed racial classification, color-coded classification—the form in which we are interested—comes later, with the Atlantic slave trade and European colonization of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Prior to the slave trade and colonization there is little evidence of color prejudice in Europe.

Kenneth Prewitt, What is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2013), ch. 2