That isn’t racism. The defining characteristic of racism compared with cultural chauvinism is that race is a permanent biological feature that is transferred from generation to generation. In other words, once a [racial slur], always a [racial slur]. For cultural chauvinism, there was a broad understanding that barbarians can be civilized if they adopted the civilization of their civilized superiors and the civilized can regress to barbarism if they adopted the savagery of their barbarian inferiors.

Racism was originally invented to persecute Jews (the Spanish had to find a way to say “once a Jew, always a Jew” when Jews were converting into Catholicism in order to not get expelled for being Jews), but it found much greater use in the enslavement of Africans. There was a general understanding at the time that Christians couldn’t enslave other Christians, and while the rule was never fully observed, the Atlantic slave trade was at a level where you couldn’t sweep that under the rug. Obviously, Africans who caught wind of this would try to convert into Christianity in order to not be enslaved. So, that’s where racism comes into play. It’s with racism that an ideological justification can be put into service for the sake of chattel slavery.

Once Europeans can say, “once a n-word, always a n-word,” they have the ideological justification to enslave as many Black people as they see. That’s also where you start seeing other bullshit like how Black people are stupid (so they can only be used as beast of burden) or how Black people can’t feel pain (so crackers don’t feel as bad when they turned a disobedient slave’s back into ground beef). But more importantly, the racial character of their oppression meant that the status of slave transfers from the mother to her children. It doesn’t matter if the mother can read or is only 0.05% Black because as long as she’s a slave, her children will be slaves too.