When it is evident you are unfamiliar with the literature of the history of race and racism. What you suggest in your post above is a quite understandable and common misconception of race.
First: "The slight biological differences were not discovered 300 years ago. :eyes:"
All critical theorists, sociologists, and anthropologists now understand that race is not biological. Race is instead the set of ideas that prompts you to look at someone and identify them racially. In the US, we understand blackness in terms of an absence of racial purity, whiteness. In other countries, like Brazil and the Dominican Republic, black and white are defined differently. A person considered white or brunette in Brazil might find themselves called Hispanic or black in the United States. That person's biology does not change during the course of a nine hour flight. Rather, they step into a culture that understands race differently from their own. Race is thus that cultural understanding, not the biology itself. The phenotypical differences among people of African descent are often greater than between those who sit on that culturally dividing line between white and black. What characteristics do we focus on to define race? You don't think about it, because it is assumed, automatic. But if you travel to a country where race is defined differently, you will see that the physical characteristics they focus on are not the same ones you use. All of this operates on the level of semi-consciousness. It is a product of culture rather than deliberate thought. PBS had an interesting series on race last summer. I was glad to see such ideas finally make it beyond academia.
That you refer to race as biological is itself a product of scientific racism. Biological categories of race only emerged in the 18th century. Race as a biologically distinct and hierarchal assignment signaling superiority and inferiority did not exist before the Enlightenment. This certainly is not to say that inequality and oppression did not exist. They most certainly did. In fact, religion was the most common means of assessing one's superiority: Christians above Indian and Africans, etc.... The Enlightenment changed that. It gave rise to scientific disciplines that categorized people according to these new biological and racial categories. The word Caucasian was first used during this time to refer to Europeans from the caucuses. The term was coined by a scientist to describe the people he saw as most beautiful and hence superior. Hierarchical notions of race became entrenched in eighteenth century Germany and British North America in similar ways. It was during the nineteenth-century, however, that racism reached its culmination in terms of a fully articulated ideology justified by science. In this country, historians note, scientific racism emerged in response to the ideals of the Enlightenment and the Declaration of Independence in particular that proclaimed all men to be created equal. If all men were equal, how could a significant part of the population be held in bondage? The answer was provided by scientists in the leading universities around the nation: Africans were not men; they were in fact closer to apes. These used a wide array of scientific measurements in order to create this notion.
The historian George Fredrickson describes this evolution of race and racism very succinctly in _Racism: A Short History_ (Princeton University Press). Amazon has a search inside function if you would like to browse through the book.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691116520/qid=1112077245/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/103-6521706-3400603(If you interested in ideas of race, I strongly encourage you to read this little book. It is highly readable and compact. Frederickson has many other works on race, but this is the most accessible. )
Inequalities, hierarchies, and oppression existed long before Westerners imagined race. But the criteria for that hierarchy differed. As you point out, slavery is discussed in the Bible. You will note that race is not. And some reading on comparative slavery would quickly inform you that slavery only became a racial institution in the Americas. Slavery had been practiced for thousands of years with no racial category or quality whatsoever. Since race did not exist when the Old and New Testaments were written, those books do not justify slavery on racial grounds.
Enslavement of Africans in America was first justified in religious terms, that they were barbarians to be saved from the dark continent. Those justifications took on the language and science of racism through the Enlightenment and the came to fruition in the nineteenth century. Christianity, you are entirely correct, justified enslavement of non-Christians, as Islam justified enslavement of infidels to that religion. The Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the enormous profits from sugar overtook religious ideas that had originally stipulated that slaves should be freed when they converted to Christianity. That would change over the course of the next few centuries until we had scientists at Harvard University measuring the craniums and noses of Africans in an effort to validate the "negroid's" essential biological condition as slave.
Patriarchy is an obvious point. Racism did indeed emerge in a patriarchy world. It was not, however, dependent on gender for its creation. Your reliance on "white patriarchy" in this context is ontological. Whiteness cannot explain the invention of race, since whiteness is itself a racial construction born along side blackness. Actually, given the time period we are discussing, Caucasian and Negroid are more appropriate terms.
Your contention, therefore, that racism is not rooted in science is quite strongly disproved by most, if not all, existing academic literature on the subject. I am of course not surprised that you would be unfamiliar with this. People seldom are. Most of what has long been common knowledge among academics rarely filterers out beyond university walls. What is somewhat unusual is your insistence on ridiculing my comments, when I would have thought it might be clear from my post above that I knew a little bit about the subject matter. Such is life. I would again encourage you to try the Frederickson book. I think you would find it both fascinating and useful.
Wikiepdia also provides some information on the subject from both a anthropological and historical perspective.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race
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