> Prejudices by, for example, the English or American against Greeks or Italians lasted into the 20th century.

Which is a bit funny, considering how they asdmired the ancient Greeks and Romans. Why did they consider their culture and statecraft as so ideal, if they considered the people that originated them as so inferior?

From what I’ve read, there was a lot of thought about them having fallen from their ancestors. Some of the eugenics types wrote about this as a cautionary tale about mixing with other races or letting them share power. The reasoning only makes sense if you start with the conclusion and work backwards trying to make it fit.