History of Racism

Literally since prehistory.
In the back of your mind if nowhere else is the knowledge that very male near your females that's not somehow related to you is an existential threat to your progeny; as the world gets larger and larger and more peoples interact with one another on nominally equal terns it's easy to see how "related to you" changes to "part of my racial group".

We need extraterrestrial enemies to unite us as a species, already.
lmao, mfw Irish and black is literally 90% of what I am.

When the aliens arrive, there will be no unity at all and instead everyone will try to use the aliens to win the conflict against fellow humans. Aliens will use this to destroy the major powers and civilizations and then conquer the Earth.

Remember this post.

Nibirians only want gold for their fusion reactors. They don't really care for earth.

Unity is overrated. Better if one people just stamps out the rest.

18th or 19th century.

Up until then many prominent writers blamed the failings of the Muslims, Blacks and Irish on upbringing and culture rather than race or innate qualities.

This is what happened to the Native Americans when Europeans showed up.

Nah dude, people would betray eachother as fast as they could to get their hands on some sweet alien tech. I know i Would

Racial theories didn't really take prominence until the 18th and 19th Centuries in Europe. Before then, discrimination typically fell on cultural and religious lines rather than believing that one "race" was inferior to the other.

Around this time you start to see pseudo-scientists like Cesare Lombroso trying to find reasons for certain cultural tendencies. For instance Lombroso tried to explain why Southern Italians conducted more crime than Northerners. Unfortunately for the sake of proper science, Lombroso, like many racial scientists at the time, reverse-engineered and had his outcome already made up before even conducting any research. When research was conducted on what made Southern Italians commit crimes it was concluded that it was their skull shapes pressing on a part of the brain which caused them to commit crime. Of course we know now that there is literally zero correlation between the two and the reason for larger amounts of crime in the South than the North are much more complex and interesting.

>When research was conducted on what made Southern Italians commit crimes it was concluded that it was their skull shapes pressing on a part of the brain which caused them to commit crime.
That's interesting.

I've always wondered why Southern Italians were so much more prone to criminal behaviour. It makes sense that their behaviour is racial in origin.

>It makes sense that their behaviour is racial in origin

If you're a simpleton with no capacity to think critically, it would make sense.

Don't you dare bait me, you nut.

Southern Italian detected.

Tribalism from time immemorial.

Some cultures, like the Romans, got over it eventually because it suited their purposes, and pretty much everyone was treated like equal shit.

...

You all do realize humans actively seek out differences and similarities ahd that this skill among others has been present before prehistory right.

Its always been about tribalism, You you look at a chimpanzee or gorilla and think to yourself he is a the same species as me?

Imagine being in a nomadic tribe 30k years ago and you stumble upon another migrating tribe and immediately notice is he much more brown or red or yellow than you are and his facial features are unlike your own, and of your kin.

You would automatically trust this person or tribe and accept him as no different than your kinfolk?

I get that nuance doesn't matter to you but thinking one is not of one's tribe is an entirely different thing to having a hierachised theory of race.

1.Multiracial =/= multicultural
2. Muhammad Ali isn't an intelligent human being to let guide your beliefs

The point being made is that racism pre-dates 18th and 19th century abstraction and writing about race, and is better described as a manifestation of tribalism rather than a historical invention.

Just read the first part of The Origins of Totalitarianism.

/thread

I understand the point being made and it is ahistorical. How can you possibly have "racism" without a concept of race to begin with. You are anachronistically applying latter-day concepts to the past for the sake of making some asinine point about how it is imbued in human nature, or something

I think a good question to follow up OP's is when did being anti-racist become so glorified?

It's odd that the irony is lost on people who are so consumed with hatred against people who they claim are so consumed with hatred.

Around colonialism. Before then is was mostly because of religion difference or because you were a foreigner of any kind.
Take the crusades. Most animosity from crusaders towards arabs was based on them being Muslim not Christian.
Most Muslim animosity towards the crusaders was because they were outsiders coming to their land with foreign customs.

You'd treat them differently from the people you knew based on the appearance alone without speaking to them.

Without a hierarchy of racism established.

That is racism.

>2. Muhammad Ali isn't an intelligent human being to let guide your beliefs
Better than some loser on Veeky Forums.

>ahistorical
Fuck off fifel.

I am not fifel

So racism is "treating people differently based on appearance"? Is race defined then solely by appearance?

Racism as we know it began with Iberian hierarchy set up in the reconquered territories of Extremadura and Granada.

These areas were largely non-Christian, with massive Jewish and Muslim populations. The vast majority of these people converted to Catholicism upon their conquest, because the alternative was expulsion or death. These huge groups of converts were not always fully accepted by their new colonizing neighbors, and their children, despite being Catholic, would often experience prejudice due to their Jewish or Muslim heritage. It was blood, not culture or religion, that was the basis of this hatred.

When the Spaniards began conquering what's now Latin America, the same rules were brought over, and codified into the casta system.

I see you've read Fredrickson as well (good post)

>Is race defined then solely by appearance?

Fuck off dolezal

No you'd treat them different because you didn't know them.

A Moor in England would just be a curiosity. Historically, racism gets worse the larger the outgroup is, and the longer they've been considered the outgroup. There are sporadic references of black people settling in England, and Henry VIII had an African trumpeter before Louis Armstrong made that a thing.

No, I'm asking. If racism, as other user defines it, is merely treating people differently based on appearance, then it follows that race is based solely on appearance. But this is obviously not the case, which calls for a redefinition of the other user's claim.

And yet that's the same basis for racism today......

This is literally how capitalists stay in power.

A homogeneous population is much harder to control and manipulate.

Race would be a non factor. Someone you don't know of the same race and someone you don't know of a foreign race would be the same, some fucker you don't know.

transatlantic slave trade also played into it fairly heavily, can find a fair amount of 18th c. sources referring to "white men"--which, at the time, referred to crew members regardless of skin color/nationality--the most famous source probably being equiano's biography

Are you sure it's not because your community see white people above them and kowtow to their needs?

Why is it not obviously the case then?

Do bigots treat others differently based merely on personality? Or how much someone makes?

Typically no, they base it on physical appearance.

Bullshit, do you treat all your cousins you personally don't know differently, over someone of another race?

If I don't personally know those cousins how can I treat them in any way at all?

I don't live in the distant past user.

Because of... where do I start? The Irish? Various ethnic tensions in Europe against Southern Europeans, Jews, Romani, etc? The "one-drop" rule? Race has never been about mere appearance. It is, as the other user said, in the blood.

The idea that racism suddenly appeared after european works about race is just part of the attempt to say that only white people can be racist.

Anything to see the poor brown people as little animals without any agency for you guys.

This.

And blood, aka Genetics determine physical appearance.

Why is this such a hard concept to understand?

Except that Fredrickson gives several non-white examples of racism.

so does blood explain why the Irish were viewed as being a separate "race"? Or the Jews? Or the Italians?

This. Racism predates European scientific racism. It is simply tribalism given systematic form. Every group of people divided the various peoples into groups.

Viewing scientific racism as an innovation, rather than simply the application of anthropology to an already very long established habit of human beings, is an error.

Even the Egyptians wrote on "the races of Man", saying there was four or five.

This is why homogenous societies are the best. There wouldn't be any cries for racism.

Literally since different tribes existed. They still kill people for being from another place in Africa... Even in Detroit they'll kill someone from another block.

I use Africans because they give a good idea of what humans were like 20,000+ years ago.

Except merely dividing people into groups is not the same as dividing them by race. You are being anachronistic.

The Egyptians wrote something that was translated to race, which is not to say that they had the same understanding of race.

Have you guys done any work on historical method at all

>white folks literally invented racism

Top kek I thought this was sjw shit

The problem is that the concept of "race" depends very much on how precise you want to be.

Every culture attempted to classify the various types of human beings into various subdivisions, from the Hebrew table of nations, to the Egyptian 'races of man', to 1800s Europeans and their conceptions of race.

The question quickly becomes, if someone classifies all mankind into several set biological groups in the distant past, by what right do you say that is not a racialist conception of humanity? Does such a conception require scientific trappings, or an organized attempt at anthropology before you admit it is what it is? Namely, an attempt, however flawed, as human taxonomy?

Yes because they do have physical differences than the English did, believe it or not, Minute as they maybe, red hair and paler skin were notable differences.

Jews are commonly mocked for their stereotypical physical features all the time, that's a poor example.

Italians typically had more of an olive complexion and dark eyes.

Yes, but then, as historians, one must go through and find important differences in how these conceptions differ and tease out what they mean about the time period. Which historians have done. And very little of these groups relied upon a necessary biological difference, in part because of how unsophisticated biological understanding was. And if the difference of groups is only based on culture or religion, (as they were), then it is hardly right to call it race.

I really didn't think you'd bite this bullet, considering how it is basically accepting scientific racism as it stood at the 18th century

The funny thing is, this still doesn't explain things like the one-drop rule

Except that's wrong, many of these differences were based on superficial differences in appearance. As the user says here most attempts at human taxonomy in the past were based on superficial appearance, what SEEMED like a different animal, a different type of man.

Things like the one-drop rule, in fact, the entire matter of race as it relates to 1800s America and Europe, is a grand exception to the general rule of "racism" throughout most of history.

The distinction between typical racism and 'scientific' racism, was that the latter attempted to find interior differences between their races. Things like bone structure, skull shape, mentality, and the like. Ideas like "purity" came into the vogue, hence the one drop rule.

The attempt at organizing these different groups by some principle or hard line of their anatomy, beyond superficial appearance, is what separated European concepts of race from earlier ones.

One drop rule is irrelevant to OP's question, and really doesn't exist til the 20th century and even then its only in a legal sense.

But you're basically denying that there are physical differences between ethnic groups of people.

You are using a completely fluid definition of race here and don't even seem to be aware of it. Is it people from different countries or regions? People of different skin colour? People of different culture?
Upon what lines the taxonomy is based is incredibly important. There is no rhyme or reason to your catch-all assertion that "racism" has always existed, and it is ahistorical, uninterested as it is about how human beings divide themselves, stopping satisfied after seeing that they do so.

I'm saying that any grouping you seek to make based on this is not discrete enough to make any solid claim, which is why scientific racism is not taken seriously

My using of a fluid definition of race is absolutely necessary, and completely intentional, because what we are really discussing here, when we talk about the history of racism, is the history of race, as a concept.

My point, if you will hear it, is that race as a concept is not the invention of Europeans, but rather simply another in a long line of attempts of human taxonomy, most of which were based on superficial appearances to divide groups, just as most primitive taxonomy was.

Every human group divides itself against other human groups, and most groups throughout history who came across a group who looked very different then themselves, put it into a separate category from separate tribes who looked similiar to themselves.

All Europeans did, was apply science to a process human beings have been engaging in since the dawn of man. To say that Europeans added anything to the idea of race beyond their attempt to classify it exactly and scientifically, instead of vaguely and by appearance [as was the norm through most of history] is complete nonsense and propaganda.

The definition used consistently is "sub-species" among modern racialists, and many of their concepts are used by biological anthropologists, doctors, and police.

1/5 US anthropologists think race is a useful concept, but in China and Russia that number is 4/5. The reason 'scientific racism' isn't taken seriously is because of cultural bias.

No where I have a argued that it should be taken seriously.

The point was that racism existed before scientific racism, and it existed over minute inconsequential reasons, and most often over physical appearance.

Racism is but one reason people divide themselves the argument is that this reason existed in prehistory. And OP specifically mentioned ethnic group.

Seeing as how physical appearance is the first you thing you notice about a person, I would say its the first way a person would judge or divide themselves and their family/group/community from another and probably predates all other discriminatory practices.

By virtue of the fact that you use this forum, the age where a permanently ethnically homogenuous nation is tenable has long since passed. Veeky Forums is visited by people from literally hundreds of countries; as you complain about multiculturalism, you are using one of the most multicultural platforms in the history of mankind.

Even Japan is expected to import thousands of immigrants within the next 20 years as a result of their waning birh rates

>Ah yes the old "You can't trade with people or exchange ideas with them unless you also allow millions of them into your country" cliche

Piss off, multiculturalism is the sit-com theory of social organization.

But you are fitting your definition of "race" here to transcend back across time, for what purpose? What use does race as an ahistorical definition serve that the terms used by inhabitants of a time would not?

You are literally just unproblematically applying terms to disparate time periods and forcing the square peg into many different-shaped holes for no sake other than triteness.

And again, the Roman's use of barbarian and the ability to become Roman is unable to be accounted for by your definition of race.

Again, you are retroactively fitting your definition of race to the time period. Ethnic group is not quite the same as race, and the distinction is important historically

This is the AAA on race, btw

"With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic "racial" groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within "racial" groups than between them. In neighboring populations there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species.

Physical variations in any given trait tend to occur gradually rather than abruptly over geographic areas. And because physical traits are inherited independently of one another, knowing the range of one trait does not predict the presence of others. For example, skin color varies largely from light in the temperate areas in the north to dark in the tropical areas in the south; its intensity is not related to nose shape or hair texture. Dark skin may be associated with frizzy or kinky hair or curly or wavy or straight hair, all of which are found among different indigenous peoples in tropical regions. These facts render any attempt to establish lines of division among biological populations both arbitrary and subjective."

No, I'm not, I am literally doing the complete opposite of that. I am acknowledging that no concept of race is universal, and that by arguing that the absence of European-style racial theories indicates a lack of racial beliefs, you are being an idiot.

No theory of race is universal or can be stretched to fit over every culture and still make sense.

The reality, the ultimate, brass reality is that European attempts at SCIENTIFICALLY classifying human beings into a sort of taxonomy, is an innovation invented in the 1800s, and not found in many places before that.

HOWEVER, attempts at classifying human beings into a sort of taxonomy, is ancient and found in many cultures.

My argument is precisely that YOU are splitting hairs by demanding that European conceptions of race be found in past epochs before you admit that OTHER conceptions of race pervade history and almost every people-group there is.

That literally doesn't contradict a thing that I just said. In fact that sort of word-game is exactly what I'm talking about.

Most people who promote racialist theories argue that the races of man constitute sub-species, not species. The fact that your source is arguing against species, like most people do, means he is arguing against a straw-man.

His claims about more genetic variety being within the group than between groups again, is fitting to a sub-species and does not disprove a word I just said.

These kinds of semantics are exactly the reason people don't take these ideas seriously. Not because they're wrong, but because the people arguing against them are fighting straw men.

>HOWEVER, attempts at classifying human beings into a sort of taxonomy, is ancient and found in many cultures.

Yes, I agree. And barely any of these qualify as or resemble our understanding of what "race" is. You are finding people making taxonomies and deciding it is racism, rather than looking at how the taxonomies differ - by culture, by religion, by region, not by "race". You are putting words in the past's mouth, which is anathema to any serious historian.

>These facts render any attempt to establish lines of division among biological populations both arbitrary and subjective.
>That literally doesn't contradict a thing that I just said

are you capable of reading

>You are putting words in the past's mouth

You saying I'm doing that does not make it so. The past concepts of race, while not identical to European scientific attempts, does not make them stop being conceptions of race.

Races according to whom? The concept of "race" did not exist until the 16th century at the earliest. Have you done any actual reading on this subject at all?

SUB-SPECIES: a category in biological classification that ranks immediately below a species and designates a population of a particular geographic region genetically distinguishable from other such populations of the same species and capable of interbreeding successfully with them where its range overlaps theirs

merriam-webster.com/dictionary/subspecies

>treating people poorly based on their ethnic group

Since time immemorial. You're got Greeks hating Romans, Macedonians hating Greeks, everyone hating Persians, Persians hating everyone else, Vietnamese hating Han, Han hating Vietnamese, both hating Tibetans, Chinese hating Mongols/Xiongnu, Xiongu/Mongols hating Han, Muslims treating blacks like shit because of Zanj and so forth.

Except it did! You're simply denying that the other concepts count as "race" no matter how well they match up with the concept.

You sure you're not the only one with those thoughts? Im pretty sure if that were true, it still doesn't explain why we shipped blacks to our own country if we viewed them as subhuman on a non-sexually motivated level.

Yes, because, as a historian, I take the points of divergence as important historical markers. Race is a modern word with modern connotations.
This is from Fredrickson's "Racism: A Short History".

"Because of the difficulty in classifying subspecies morphologically, many biologists have found the concept problematic, citing issues such as:[19]

Visible physical differences do not always correlate with one another, leading to the possibility of different classifications for the same individual organisms.
Parallel evolution can lead to the existence of the appearance of similarities between groups of organisms that are not part of the same species.
Isolated populations within previously designated subspecies have been found to exist.
The criteria for classification may be arbitrary if they ignore gradual variation in traits."

I don't think that was what he was implying, user.

And as a linguist, I take the points of similiarity to be important historical markers. All words meanings are ultimately arbitrary, what we should be looking for when looking into the history of racism, is the history of related, and similiar concepts.

If you insist upon finding a particular concept in its exact form in the past, you're unlikely to find very much at all. But if you accept similiar ideas as expressions of the same principle, you will find much more.

Race, in its exact European form is modern, but the idea of a taxonomic classification of human beings is ancient, going back to the Hebrews, the Egyptians, the Chinese, etc.

Calling the entire concept of subspecies into question is a truly desperate measure. If you have to throw out an entire layer of taxonomy, just to avoid an obvious conclusion, namely, that genetically distinct populations of human beings exist, you've really done everything except forfeit the argument.

The reason the West is against racialist concepts has nothing to do with science and everything to do with ideology. The West believes in tabula rasa. Everyone is equal, everyone is born equal, everyone has the same potential. Our growing knowledge genetics, rejects that 1700s philosophical relic wholesale, so of course we dig our heels in, because our entire political ideology is rooted in an idea that is complete and total bullshit.

And the more we learn about genetics, and the more we learn about the actual differences in populations, the less ideology is going to be able to suppress it.

>pressing on a part of the brain

Oh, so wearing a tight hat makes me more likely to steal a bike. Good to know.

I think this comes down to a fundamental difference in viewpoints between us. I leave you with Fredrickson's Racism a Short History to read, as I think you might find it of interest.

drive.google.com/file/d/0B0_FjdluRK7uNWM2ODYzMWYtZTU2MS00MzMzLWEzMDMtMzVlZDM4YTc5NDU5/view?usp=sharing

I'm just going by what the biologists are saying re: race as a biological concept, friend. Your quarrel is with them, not me. I'm confident that in your knowledge of a suppressed truth you will eventually find the victory you seek.

I think a large part of the differences in our viewpoints on this issue boils down to semantics. How similiar do difference concepts have to be before we accept it as historical evidence of the same concept.

For example, if I admitted that race in its exact form did not exist in the past, but race in a different form existed, and you said that race didn't exist, but historical precursors to the idea did, I think we would find we were in fact saying the same thing.

I think the issue of biology as regards race falls into much the same category. I think people are twisting semantics for the sake of ideology.

In any case I thank you for the discussion. Its been interesting.

It's basic human tribal behaviour, it's existes since the beginning of time and it's never going to truly go away.

You are participating in idealistic wankery if you ever think it's going to disappear.

The guy you are arguing with in plain retarded, just want to point that out. I'm sure you are well aware though.

I think the real stumbling block in this thread is ideology. I get and basically agree with what people are saying when the current understanding of race is a modern thing. The problem is, if race suddenly pops up in the 18th century, anti-racism become a crusade to return to do away with a concept we've had to 300 years rather than overcome the worst parts of human nature.

Because they weren't viewed as proper humans, for the most part, and when it appeared that that was going to change we came very close to shipping all of them back to Africa just to avoid sharing the same landmass with them and when that failed we institutionally discriminated against them for hundreds of years until that got shot down as well and now silent loathing is pretty much the only opinion left that doesn't make a pariah out of you.

Racism is very natural. At the age of about 5, I was afraid of people with really blue eyes. My grandparent all had a mixture of different colors, like blue green, grey, etc; I was just afraid of people with sky blue eyes. They scared me. And I hated them, and I think the reason is because a lot of TV-villains at the time had those devlish blue eyes. It's funny that at such a young age my mind is able to make such a small connection as eye color to hatred. It would be very easy if such a person had altogether different looks.
We literally learn not to be racist later on in life.

If racism is because of ignorance, then children are the most racist. If racism is learned, then racists aren't ignorant.

>caring about what a literal 78 IQ retard said

Buttmad libtard detected

He's saying the truth and that hurts your little feelings