If you look at how the USA has progressed, the south is STILL stuck in certain trends that affect current day society. It’s why they’re the bible belt, but states like Arizona and California aren’t reffered to as “the south”.
Geographically it makes no sense. California, Arizona, New Mexico, they’re all geographically south, but that’s not what that means.
And racism in the south is just so much more amplified than it is in other states. When you think about it, the 1860s are not THAT long ago in terms of societies.
I think we’re still being affected by actions from those times. A family experiences hardship. So they raise their kid to not trust those that caused it. And that kid grows up and does the same. Without a break in the chain, it just perpetuates more of the same.
So we’re only about 8 generations removed from that time. It’s really not that much. And OBVIOUSLY slavery is going to cause racism.
But what if the slaves were left on Africa, and the plantation owners just had automated drones that did all the work?
What would racism today look like?
Well, racism is not, unfortunately, either a recent invention or an exclusive ideology either. As an example, the stereotype of a drunk Irishman is a racist stereotype that was also common in America’s history. If you can define a group of people, chances are there is a stereotype about them.
The one that sticks in my head is “gypped” for getting screwed over is based on gypsies and is the equivalent of saying “jewed” for some other people. Either one is a racist stereotype, but I didn’t realize the first wasn’t just a common term until it was pointed out to me.
One that I didn’t know about was the pronounciation of “Arab”.
I’ve heard “air-ab” and I’ve heard “a-rab”. I thought they were both just different pronounciations. Turns out “a-rab” is offensive, and racist. I literally grew up being babysat as a kid by a family of arabs, and didn’t find this out until I was 28.
I have no memory of if I ever pronounced the word wrong around any of them, and now I cringe looking back. I must not have offended them. They always accepted me as one of their own.
Skin is just a lazy way of seeing “the other”. If we all, worldwide, collectively fucked our way to a uniform pigment, we would just find another way to define “the other”.
Yep as just one example that happens all the time in east Asia. Be it different shades or castes.
Easy to see in EU, Slavic people are seen as less than, even though we’re as white as everyone else around and in the particular case of my country, we have more Germanic genes than Slavic, but hey, prejudices don’t need to make sense.
Yep, even happened in the US with Italians and such.
See what’s going on in European countries that haven’t used significant numbers of African slaves. You know, it’s possible to enslave your own population too. Anyway, there’s definitely racism in Europe, even though the history with regard to using African slaves is completely different. Nowadays, racists hate all foreigners regardless of skin color.
Actually, people seem to gravitate towards this weird sort of tribalism when the in-group and out-group are pretty arbitrary concepts. It doesn’t even have to be based on skin color, language or religion. People just hate other people because they were born in the wrong town.
If America never used any African slaves at all, normal human tribalism would still be there to mess things up. There would be groups based on arbitrary things that slang, facial features, dietary preferences, fashion choices etc. Racism wouldn’t disappear. It would just be aimed at some other group.
Racism existed before slavery. It just changes focus and details in different places at different times. Might not be “race” based in the way we have today, based in arbitrary skin color lines, but prejudice against a given group absolutely is a human failing.
Slavery was as much a product of racism as it was a generator of the current brand of racism that exists in the US. Well, slavery in this context, I’m not well enough versed in older forms to be confident in how much of those were built on the same kind of prejudice. For all I know, Roman slaves may not have been taken based in prejudices the way Africans in specific were during the cross Atlantic slave trade. But those Africans were absolutely considered lesser before the trade got going. And that was absolutely a major factor in the slave trade’s origins.
Robots, you might have reduced or eliminated the slave trade, but it wouldn’t have done a damn thing about racism. There’s always some group that’s going to be a target, and the sheer arrogance of European colonizers would have found even more emphasis on anti-native racism than what they had to begin with. Or the Irish, or the Chinese, or whoever else ended up being at the bottom of their perceived scale of humanity.
You won’t see the end of racism until we see the end of race mattering at all, and even then you won’t eliminate the underlying drives that generate racism.
Racism might unfortunately be natural and an evolutionary advantage, since mistrusting other tribes could save your life, therefore passing on this trait when reproducing. Everyone is prejudiced to some degree, even if they claim they aren’t.
I’m biased against Arch Linux users 👀
:(
This is ignoring medieval history entirely where bigotry was focused on religion, but broadly people with different skin colors were accepted. It is also ignoring ancient history where differently skin colored people could raise in ranks (up to general), and bigotry was culture centric.
I agree that tribalism is a very old thing, but racism is brand new in history terms.
Neither invalidates the other.
Racism is bigotry.
Tribalism is bigotry.
Antisemitism is bigotry.
Hating gays is bigotry.
It’s all bigotry.
There’s nothing special about any form of bigotry. It’s all horrendous.
Saying that doesn’t invalidate the horrendous nature of any form of bigotry.
