• 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.