CDZ The Beginning of Racism?

[FA_Q2]

racism is part of human nature, you will never stop it.

I doubt that. If that was true everyone would be racist.

No.

Racism is part of the human condition but that does not mean all people are inclined to be racist - just that it will exists in any large and multicultural society. Racism is not new and didn't start with a single society. That simply does not makes sense.

This seems intuitively sensible, but yet I wonder. In America, for example, seventeenth-century Europeans had little regard for a biological concept of race, perceiving peoples in terms of social rank rather than pigmentation. Sorting identities into white, red, and black was more a product of colonization than a precondition for it. The Europeans enjoyed ecological, technological, and organizational advantages over Indians and Africans, which was all that mattered in their domination of them.

Class distinctions, such as between common planters and great planters, could be obscured by making skin color a key marker for identity. Whites - rich, poor, and middling - found a shared identity in the psychology of race that held them to be superior to blacks. Racial solidarity gave whites a sense of equality with each other, despite inequalities in economic circumstances.

I don't really see a difference though. Racism is, by definition, centered around race but the underlying hate and superiority is no different than someone believing they are better because they are a different class of individual by birth. Essentially, the only real difference in what you are pointing out is the fact that society was stratifying people by class rather than race. The reasoning is the same.

You might be able to argue that racism specifically might be a societal projection of that part of humanity that believes itself superior to others. That certainly does not support the OP's assertion though. Rather, it refutes it.

 

[Asclepias]

racism is part of human nature, you will never stop it.

I doubt that. If that was true everyone would be racist.

No.

Racism is part of the human condition but that does not mean all people are inclined to be racist - just that it will exists in any large and multicultural society. Racism is not new and didn't start with a single society. That simply does not makes sense.

This seems intuitively sensible, but yet I wonder. In America, for example, seventeenth-century Europeans had little regard for a biological concept of race, perceiving peoples in terms of social rank rather than pigmentation. Sorting identities into white, red, and black was more a product of colonization than a precondition for it. The Europeans enjoyed ecological, technological, and organizational advantages over Indians and Africans, which was all that mattered in their domination of them.

Class distinctions, such as between common planters and great planters, could be obscured by making skin color a key marker for identity. Whites - rich, poor, and middling - found a shared identity in the psychology of race that held them to be superior to blacks. Racial solidarity gave whites a sense of equality with each other, despite inequalities in economic circumstances.

I don't really see a difference though. Racism is, by definition, centered around race but the underlying hate and superiority is no different than someone believing they are better because they are a different class of individual by birth. Essentially, the only real difference in what you are pointing out is the fact that society was stratifying people by class rather than race. The reasoning is the same.

You might be able to argue that racism specifically might be a societal projection of that part of humanity that believes itself superior to others. That certainly does not support the OP's assertion though. Rather, it refutes it.

You certainly came up with some mental gymnastics to explain your lack of knowledge regarding the difference between racism and nationalism/tribalism/classism. Nationalism has nothing to do with racism. There are different races in the US and people claim Americans are the best.

Please explain how the existence of classicism refutes the OP. This ought to be interesting.

 

[jwoodie]

Found this quote by Aristotle and it conveys to me two things. Aristotle may have been the first racist and that he considered himself (a Greek) to be non-white. Could the Greeks have been the first racists despite their admission they learned much from the Egyptians?

Sure, why not?