So the slave trade or other colonization, where white people stole land, enslaved people, etc.

http://www.understandingrace.org/resources/pdf/disease/smedley.pdf

another link:

http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-02-09.htm

between recognizing some people come from the same place as you and some don't, from the concept of race. Japanese people would recognize that Korean people were from Korea rather than Japan, but that wouldn't be any different from people from England being from England rather than Japan. It's just "people from somewhere else." But this idea that people from Japan and Korea belong to the same category and people from England are in a different category and that's why people from England have taken over some parts of Asia - that's what "race" is, and it started with colonization.

is that if Rachael Dolezal wanted to experience what it is like to be black, the closest she could honestly come would be to be white in her group of mainly black friends and family. That experience of being considered different, Other, not quite right is how main stream society treats black Americans at all times. Not being able to see yourself in a variety of ways in film and tv; not blending in anywhere in public; your language, codes, references not fitting with the main stream group - that is what she would experience as a 'minority' member of her in-group. She could have used that experience to be a proper ally for black Americans. Instead, she decided in her arrogance that she would appropriate acceptance and 'majority' status by lying, foregoing the hard work allyship always is, and use black womanhood as a mask in doing so.

or family, or region, or anything else. No single group of people did. I'm sure it's been practiced by any and all human beings, in one form or another, for a long time.

Read the links in post 4, or google "When did the concept of race begin." It's a fairly new concept, and it was started by white people to try to explain and excuse why they could take away land from other people and enslave people.

Nobody ever justified it based on whatever they wanted to justify it on? That's crazy. Impossible actually. White people aren't that special.

I'll agree that some sort of official concept may have been created by Europeans while they colonized the world, but that's just the timing of how history played out more so than white people being the first evil group, and discrimination based on A, B, or C has been going on, wherever humans have been, for a long time, just on smaller scales.

but the concept of race - not just a people you've conquered, but a different grouping of people from another part of the world who, due to how they look and the area of the world they come from, have a right to steal land and enslave people, started with European colonization.

Before race, it was, "They lost the war, so we can do what we want." After the concept of race, it was, "We are of a superior race/they are of an inferior race, so we can do what we want."

that is certain. It is a social construct, not a biological thing.