Young argues that racism, as distinct from ancient tribalism/ethnocentrism, is a specific historical invention, not a timeless feature of human nature. He traces its construction to colonial Virginia in the late 1600s, where after Bacon's Rebellion united poor white and Black laborers against the elite, lawmakers created hereditary, race-based slavery to prevent cross-racial solidarity — reinforced by a fabricated "Curse of Ham" theology and later pseudo-scientific racial hierarchies. He also describes "whiteness" itself as an invented unifying category offered to poor Europeans as a psychological wage, and argues this 17th-century architecture still shapes wealth, law, and politics today.