In the documentary Race: The Power of an Illusion, historian Mia Bay says that “part of where the idea of race comes from [is] in the tendency for people to see existing power relationships as having some sort of natural quality to them.” What does she mean? Why would people of European descent in the late 1600s begin to believe that people of African descent were naturally or biologically inferior to them? What role might economics have played in encouraging this belief? What role might have been played by the insecurity some felt about their social status?