Where does the idea of race come from? According to Gabbidon and Greene (2016), this question is important since crime is a large part of the race dialogue. Be sure to write scholarly and not in your voice (i.e., I found, I believe, etc. Instead, state, according to the research, Smith and Jones (2017) suggest...).

Your question is very broad. To explore the antecedents of race and racism, we would need to venture into the Enlightenment, when key thinkers, such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant, posited the "inferiority" of darker-skinned peoples, particularly black people, based on the scientific racism that was emerging in the early 19th century.
Arthur de Gobineau, a well-educated French aristocrat, created the notion of the "Aryan master race" and believed that the "master race" became diluted when it mixed with "black and yellow strains." Scientific racists, such as Gobineau, used anthropology, anthropometry (the measurement of people), craniometry (the measurement of skulls), and phrenology (determining the size and shape of the skull to find out someone's character and intellectual ability), to justify the notion that Europeans were the most superior group, and Africans the most inferior.
These pseudo-scientific racial theories persisted in Europe with the advent of Nazism, but were also popular in the United States. Thomas Jefferson was a proponent of scientific racism, writing in his essay "Notes on Virginia" that black people were incorrigibly inferior and even had an inherent odor. Indigenous people, he surmised, were inferior to whites as well, but had the potential to learn and be assimilated. Thus, slavery—and later, Jim Crow laws—was justified by scientific racism whose ideas were embraced by the nation's founders.
Because Race and Crime focuses on the United States, it is important to consider how ideas based in scientific racism were used and are still used (consider Charles Murray's controversial book, The Bell Curve) to justify the subordination and disenfranchisement of non-white groups—despite the fact that our society is less explicitly racist than it once was.
Gabbidon and Greene discuss the impact of race in policing and in the criminalization of black people. After the end of Reconstruction with the Compromise of 1877, certain activities that were mainly associated with black people, such as public gambling, became criminal activities. The South was enthusiastic in corralling and imprisoning black people for nonviolent crimes, which led to the rise of convict leasing. Prisoners were placed on chain gangs and performed labor at the service of the state. Some scholars, including the author of The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander, argue that this was merely another way to obtain slave labor. Comparisons are also made to our contemporary legal system, which enacts harsher punishments and generally provides worse legal defense for black and Latino offenders for nonviolent crimes.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Arthur-de-Gobineau