Tracing the Origins of Prejudice: How Race and Gender Discrimination Emerged

Prejudice and discrimination are not random social accidents. They have histories, theories, and economic foundations that stretch back centuries. To understand why race and gender remain such powerful axes of inequality today, we need to trace how scholars, colonisers, and societies first invented the idea that some humans were naturally superior to others. The story moves through 19th-century laboratories, ancient agricultural fields, and the everyday stereotypes that quietly shape who gets a job, an education, or a voice.

Evolutionism and the manufacturing of racial hierarchies 🔗

The 19th century is often celebrated as an age of scientific progress, but it was also the period when racism was systematically dressed up as biology. Two competing theories tried to explain why humans looked different across the world: monogenism, which argued that all people descended from a single common ancestor, and polygenism, which claimed that different races were essentially different species with separate origins. During the Age of Enlightenment, concepts of monogenism and polygenism became popular and were systematised epistemologically during the 19th century, providing what looked like scientific cover for prejudice.

Before Darwin, polygenism gained particular traction in places where racial domination was politically useful. Scientists attempted to prove the various races were different and could be ranked in a hierarchical manner from “greatest” to “least”, with monogenists arguing the races had “degenerated” from Adam and Eve as they moved further from Eden, and polygenists arguing the races were never one species to begin with. Both theories ended up at the same conclusion: white Europeans sat at the top of the human ladder.

How Darwin reshaped, but did not end, scientific racism 🔗

When Darwin’s theory of evolution offered a coherent explanation for human diversity from a common ancestor, polygenism began to lose ground in scientific circles. However, although polygenism fell out of favour, scientific racism did not – it adapted to take on new forms, including evolutionary forms. Racial hierarchies were now framed as different “stages” of evolution, with non-European peoples cast as living examples of humanity’s earlier, less advanced past.

Race science as a tool of colonialism 🔗

These theories were never just academic. They were operational. European powers used racial hierarchies to justify why they “needed” to govern other societies. In the Indian subcontinent, colonial administrators wove race science into the very fabric of governance. French and German Indologists created a hierarchy of races to argue that while India was originally home to the Indo-European or Aryan people, racial intermixing over centuries with “inferior” races had caused the degeneration of Indian civilisation. The British then used these ideas to argue that Indians needed to be governed according to their racial heritage, creating categories such as “martial” races and “criminal” races.

Officials like Herbert Risley used the pseudoscience of anthropometry – measuring noses, skulls, and bodies – to map caste onto race. The data collected gave a “scientific” illusion to the construction of naturalising caste and actively facilitated the colonial governance of the subcontinent through codified law. A flexible social system became a rigid, racialised hierarchy that served imperial administration. The damage outlasted the empire itself.

Patriarchy: how property changed the position of women 🔗

Gender-based discrimination has an equally specific, traceable history. It is not a “natural” fact of human life. In many early human societies, the division of labour between men and women was complementary, not hierarchical. The shift came later – and it came tied to economics.

Friedrich Engels, in his 1884 work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, argued that women’s subordination emerged hand in hand with the rise of private property. Marxist theory assigns the origin of patriarchy to the emergence of private property, which has traditionally been controlled by men – in this view, men directed household production and sought to control women in order to ensure the passing of family property to their own (male) offspring, while women were limited to household labour and producing children. Engels called this transformation the “world-historic defeat of the female sex.”

From shared resources to inherited wealth 🔗

The mechanism was straightforward. As long as humans lived in small, mobile groups gathering and hunting, there was little surplus to fight over and no land to inherit. With settled agriculture, particularly plough-based farming and animal domestication, communities could now produce more than they needed to survive. That surplus had to be stored, defended, and eventually passed on. Women’s subordination emerged in the ancient Middle East at the same time as private ownership of property and plough agriculture, which significantly increased the food supply but also significantly increased the resources needed to produce that food.

Once property entered the picture, paternity became important. A man could not pass land to “his” sons unless he was certain they were his. Controlling women’s sexuality, mobility, and choices became, from the perspective of property owners, a kind of economic insurance. Marriage was reshaped to serve this function, and women’s reproductive capacity became the first form of property to be policed.

Why matrilineal societies tell us patriarchy is not “natural” 🔗

One of the strongest pieces of evidence against the idea that patriarchy is biologically inevitable is the existence of matrilineal societies, where descent and often inheritance pass through women. In India, communities such as the Khasi and Garo in Meghalaya and the Nairs of Kerala practised matriliny for generations. Among the Iroquois, women controlled the store of vegetables, meat and other goods, arranged marriages, and nominated and deposed the sachems. These societies show that women’s subordination is a product of specific social and economic arrangements, not human nature.

Stereotypes: the everyday machinery of prejudice 🔗

If colonialism and property gave us the architecture of discrimination, stereotypes are the bricks that keep it standing day after day. A stereotype is a generalised belief about a group – that women are emotional, that Dalits are uneducated, that Muslims are a particular way, that people from a certain region are lazy. Stereotypes feel harmless because they pass as common sense. They are not.

How stereotypes become discrimination 🔗

Stereotypes serve as cognitive shortcuts. The brain uses them to process social information quickly, but the cost is enormous. Over time, they harden into prejudice – a negative attitude toward a group – and then translate into discrimination, which is unfair treatment based on group membership. The Sachar Committee Report of 2006 highlighted how stereotypes about Muslims feed directly into prejudice in hiring practices and social interactions, resulting in discrimination in education, employment, and access to resources.

The same machinery operates around gender. Stereotypes about women being “naturally” suited for caregiving and unsuited for leadership shape decisions about who gets hired, promoted, or paid fairly. They influence how parents invest in sons versus daughters and how schools treat boys versus girls.

The double burden faced by marginalised women 🔗

Stereotypes do not operate in isolation. They stack, multiplying disadvantage for those at the intersection of several marginalised identities. High proportions of men and women across all social groups disapprove of women working outside their homes, consider it acceptable for husbands to beat their wives, and would object to relatives marrying a Dalit person. For a Dalit woman, the stereotypes attached to caste and gender combine to create a lived experience of exclusion that neither a savarna woman nor a Dalit man faces in the same way. Women from socially and economically marginalised communities such as the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes have had little choice but to work for wages, to supplement household incomes, even as social attitudes punish them for stepping outside the home.

Stereotypes and access to opportunity 🔗

The practical cost of stereotypes is measured in opportunities denied. Stereotype threat – the anxiety that one will confirm a negative belief about one’s group – can suppress performance in classrooms, interviews, and workplaces. Tribal communities, persons with disabilities, religious minorities, and LGBTQ+ individuals all face their own clusters of stereotypes that translate into barriers in education, healthcare, housing, and political participation. The National Crime Records Bureau in India consistently reports a significant number of crimes motivated by prejudice, particularly against marginalised communities.

The threads connecting race, gender, and stereotype 🔗

Looking at race and gender side by side, a pattern becomes hard to miss. Both forms of discrimination took shape when one group needed to justify control over another’s body, labour, or land. Race science gave colonisers a reason to govern; private property gave men a reason to control women; and stereotypes gave both arrangements an everyday vocabulary that ordinary people could repeat without questioning. Each system reinforced the others. Colonial race theories in India also carried strong assumptions about gender, prescribing Victorian notions of femininity onto Indian women and using the supposed “rescue” of women as a justification for imperial rule.

The good news is that history works both ways. If these systems were built, they can also be dismantled. Legal frameworks like the Constitution of India, the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, and various gender equality provisions exist precisely because societies have recognised that the origins of prejudice are social, not natural. What is socially made can be socially remade – through education, representation in media, intergroup contact, and policies that target the structural roots rather than only the symptoms.

What do you think? Which stereotypes from your own social environment do you now recognise as inherited from older systems of power rather than facts about people? And if private property reshaped gender relations thousands of years ago, what economic shifts today might be quietly reshaping them again?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism
2. https://sites.nd.edu/abigail-brunory/summaries/chapter-2-american-polygeny-and-craniometry-before-darwin/
3. https://aeon.co/essays/modern-racism-rests-on-scientific-theories-from-the-19th-century
4. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-97-6207-1_16
5. https://academic.oup.com/lril/article/12/1/23/7634334
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarchy
7. https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences-and-law/anthropology-and-archaeology/anthropology-terms-and-concepts/patriarchy
8. https://www.socialistalternative.org/2014/09/04/engels-and-womens-liberation/
9. https://www.dalvoy.com/en/upsc/mains/previous-years/2019/psychology-paper-i/stereotypes-prejudice-discrimination-india
10. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10371215/
11. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10371215/