The early genesis of the term racism, the development of thought around it and the eventual doctrine or ideology it would manifest in in later years, is a jungle of different ideas, by equally different authors. The UN does not define “racism” as such, but did attempt to knit something called “racial discrimination” together.
According to the 1965 UN International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the term “racial discrimination” shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction, or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.
In their 1978 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice (Article 1), the UN states, “All human beings belong to a single species and are descended from a common stock. They are born equal in dignity and rights and all form an integral part of humanity.”

“The idea of an original, clear-cut and permanent inequality among the different races is one of the oldest and most widely held opinions in the world.” (Thomas Jackson, American Renaissance).

The UN definition of racial discrimination does not make any distinction between discrimination based on ethnicity and race, in part because the distinction between the two has been a matter of debate among academics, including anthropologists. Similarly, in British law the phrase racial group means “any group of people who are defined by reference to their race, colour, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origin.”
Oh, dear. It’s this national origin thing that starts to complicate things. The popular urban myth that Leo Trotsky, that arch-survivor (His luck did run out in Mexico) of the Russian Revolution, coined the phrase to derogate the enemies of the arch-left, is one of the more enduring pillars of the above-named hypothesis, but several sources indicate that it is simply not true.
Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, born in 1816, has been called among other things, the “father of racism,” by people who think he was the intellectual precursor to the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis. Gobineau himself stated that many people had written about race before he did:
“The idea of an original, clear-cut and permanent inequality among the different races is one of the oldest and most widely held opinions in the world.” (Thomas Jackson, American Renaissance).
He was, however, the first to study race seriously as an important force in world history. He was a French diplomat and journalist, novelist, Orientalist, and poet as well as a race theorist.

Although anti-racists today try to paint Gobineau as a “racist” and nothing more, he was a man of considerable parts. He published his major work, Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, in four volumes, from 1853 to 1855. It did not attract much notice, and only began to influence European thinking 20 years later, after Gobineau became friends with Richard Wagner, and this is where the trouble started. The Nazis later adopted Gobineau as one of their own, considerably damaging his reputation in the process, but you would have had to had to be a literary magician of some contortion to paint him as a National Socialist.

Locally, race, and its concomitant partner in crime, racism, have often been bandied about by populist politicians to achieve gain among their followers.

An overpowering thought process in today’s political arena is the idea that White people cannot be victims of racism. The Jews of the Holocaust, South African farmers and the Armenians of 1915 would probably disagree quite strenuously with that. As would the White slaves of the Barbary pirates, but then, who is still counting, today….?
The world of the late 19th and early 20th century did not know the meaning of the term human rights, and it was a given that Negroid people, wherever they found themselves under White rule, were not treated with kid gloves. They were not well regarded in many parts of the English-speaking world, including Southern Africa.
Locally, race, and its concomitant partner in crime, racism, have often been bandied about by populist politicians to achieve gain among their followers. The mention of a certain diet, hair colour or even behaviour, is a social construct now routinely regarded as racist among so-called injured parties, and more liberal leaning societies like the USA, South Africa and the European Union wield the law in this regard with rigid impunity.