 Walter Rodney states

The role of slavery in promoting racist prejudice and ideology has been carefully studied in certain situations, especially in the USA.The simple fact is that no people can enslave another for four centuries without coming out with a notion of superiority, and when the colour and other physical traits of those peoples were quite different it was inevitable that the prejudice should take a racist form.Eric Williams argued that "A racial twist [was] given to what is basically an economic phenomenon.