Certainly long before the Louisiana purchase, and other westward expansion. Russia is less of a prison of nations that the US is.
Certainly long before the Louisiana purchase, and other westward expansion. Russia is less of a prison of nations that the US is.
no it hasn't race as a concept was made up in the 1600's. The idea that there are white people and black people literally isn't old enough for people to have been racist for millenia
Technically speaking, classifications of Subsaharan Africans and Central/East Asians into their own boxes goes as far back to Ancient Rome, at least since the Romans started cultivating relations with Cushitic and Ethiopian kingdoms after the conquest of Egypt (which already had a diverse population). Of course, there wasn't the system of exploitation and conquest which would make said classifications less obscure beyond footnotes by explorers/geographers.
Aside from that, it's certainly possible to be racist towards people who you consider biologically separate. A significant amount of Romans certainly were towards other Europeans they conquered (though it's not quite comparable to what we'd see later in the 18th century onwards).
yeah but those boxes weren't racial in the modern sense as for example the Romans believed that by gaining Roman citizenship people in Africa would become Roman and no less Roman than another Roman citizen from Europe or even the Italian peninsula.
the idea of heritable race not based on identity or tribe but genetic difference is relatively new
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i don’t really think the last two points you guys made negate each other tbh. the “inherited supremacy” shit was more of like a precursor to modern racist ideology, and aristotle definitely wasn’t referring to “white” people or “black” people as the concepts of white, black, other races, didn’t exist the way they do now.
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Pretty sure this is not correct.
It is. The first mention of the word “race” in any language was in the 16th century. Racialism is a system of human taxonomy that was invented post-enlightenment.
Of course there was bigotry, xenophobia and ethnic persecution before that. Racism is a specific thing though, and it was invented at the advent of capitalism
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Let me know how you figure people were discriminating by race before the concept of discrete color-based races was even invented. Putting people into boxes that hadn’t yet been defined or imagined.
The concept predates a particular vernacular.
The concept of racism predates racial categorization? Since race is a social construct (no discrete biological or genetic categories) how is that possible? Society had to construct it first before using it as a tool.
Are you confusing xenophobia, bigotry, tribalism and ethnic persecution with racism? They are not the same thing, racism is a subset of the others and a new invention of modernity and the scientific community of the developing capitalist states
Prior to "race" as a concept being invented to justify colonial atrocities, xenophobic discourse hinged on things like religion, diet, and climate rather than blood. Like before they got the idea to start measuring skulls and whatnot they thought that warm climates and flavorful food would make people "base and bestial" (I'll add that this is a weirdly persistent reactionary idea that you still see popping up today by people who cram handfuls of raw, unseasoned ground meat down their gullet as a performative display of purity and masculinity) and before that it was purely religious ideas about all non-christians being little more than demons in human skin or the like.
Racism developed after the conversion of indigenous peoples to christianity, as Europeans needed a new excuse for why they were continuing to enslave and slaughter them as the religious subjugation and conversion arguments they'd relied on stopped being useful.