• 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.