Certainly long before the Louisiana purchase, and other westward expansion. Russia is less of a prison of nations that the US is.

  • RamrodBaguette [comrade/them, he/him]
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    edit-2
    2 years ago

    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).

    • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
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      edit-2
      2 years ago

      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

        • Yeat [he/him]
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          2 years ago

          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.