• CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    13 days ago

    Homophobia isn’t universal, but it’s not an uncommon cultural feature either.

    Racism, specifically centering around skin colour and related features, is actually pretty recent and pretty Western. In ancient times they hated over different things. Religion was obviously big in the medieval period, food preferences come up surprisingly often if you go all the way back to clay tablet times.

    • Laser@feddit.org
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      14 days ago

      Raceism, specifically centering around skin colour and related features, is actually pretty recent and pretty Western.

      If I may take a guess, it’s also because up until historically recently, larger groups of ethnicities didn’t know that other such groups existed. To be racist, you need to be aware of people you’d clarify as another race

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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        14 days ago

        Nah, people did move around a bit. Herodotus discusses the “Aetheops” (subsaharan Africans) in his Histories, for example. Rome straight up had emperors who we wouldn’t consider white.

        The real catalyst seems to have been the situation in the New World, where coincidentally black slaves were suddenly cheap and abundant, and the colonisers where much lighter than the natives. It was a convenient worldview, basically.