Racism was the ideology of European, then the US and Japanese Colonisation; the framework of ideas that justified every act that subdued populations across the world. The ideas varied over time. In 1492, racism was mixed with Catholicism, by the Spanish invaders. By the time the Reformation and the Settlement of the Calvinists into America, racism was mixed with the new religion.

Racial chattel slavery, as practised in the North and South Americas over four centuries, represented bondage not seen before at new levels of human inferiority and violence. European chattel slavery required two elements which on the whole was not present in earlier forms of slavery; private ownership and racism. Only under the ideology of European racism could chattel slavery exist in the extreme from that it took. Chattel slavery was the ownership of one person by another as a form of property; it became prerequisite for plantation settlement for sugar and coffee - the beginnings of industrial capitalism.