I was taught that people were never racist until just a few hundred years ago

Colonialism existed before the 19th century.

yeah sorta....culture mattered much more than race.
>black romans
>>red-headed chinese

Yeah I mean people in power certainly didn't give a shit about other people, especially tribes.
But look up 1800s racial theory, it didn't become defined until very recently (between 1600s-1800s)

It's more complicated.

Back in - let's say - Roman times or 16th century or whatever, the "ruling" identity was religious, cultural or class one.
Christian aristocracy was relatively cosmopolitan, especially in early modern era, for instance.

However that people weren't racist is overstatement, they were, just like any people in any era - xenophobic. Something new arrives? Well at first it's new, interesting. Then they start to hate it because it's different and doesn't really fit their community.

So for example if a brothel managed to get a black girl in and it would be totally new thing around, she would get tons of clients and generate ENORMOUS profit(as a curiosity trip of sorts), but if every other brothel would replace all of their prostitutes with blacks, people would be fed-up with them.

They didn't really thought of them as being inherently worse than westerners. They saw that they're different like they thought Africans are good for slave labour etc. but religious divisions played much bigger role in all of this("heathen" instead of "nigger") than the racial ones.

19th century introduced enormous amounts of "biologically" racist ideas, coming from 2 sources:
>Americans trying to make slavery look like something legitimate
>European colonial powers trying to make colonial exploitation to look like something legitimate

Which coupled with rise of nationalism and various exceptionalist beliefs ended up in what is nowadays considered racism(not by retarded regressive left but by normal people).

>Racism is power plus prejudice.
>SJW definition of racism

wait a sec are u trying to rustle my jimmies?

>Racism is power plus prejudice.
That's a retarded definition I've never heard anyone use (except from you). Racism is the belief that there's races, these races can be but in a hierarchical order, and this hierarchical order can be used in order to justify discrimination.

Why is that guy wearing a tentacool on his head?

>the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.

>prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.

Its a sjw meme used to excuse blacks everytime they burn down a korean grocery or say something about how all white people should be slaves.

Yes and no; on the one hand your average person probably wouldn't ever see more than a handful of people that weren't their own race and/or ethnic group and anyone with the cause and means to travel that far was probably someone very important or an underling to a similar someone) so there wasn't much opportunity for familiarity to breed contempt but on the other hand most people would be horrified at the thought of their progeny marrying a foreigner of any stripe, most people opined that foreign cultures were backwards and barbaric to some degree or another (especially when it came to yuros traveling to the orient and vice versa) and there are many instances of violence between ethnic groups in areas like the Balkans or India where many numerous unrelated ethnic groups coexisted - considering that ethnicity used to be much more important than it currently is, it would probably be fair to portray those clashes as small scale race wars. However, it should not be understated that just like all race wars these ones had a cultural component.

"Racism" as a word was invented by communists in the 1930s and used since the end of World War II to delegitimate right-wing politics in the West.

Well, Othello was shit on for being dark skinned, so yeah.

The first use of the word "Racist" was by an advocate of Fascism :^)

Reminder that even if that were true it wouldn't matter, but it's a myth made by Nazi skin heads

Eg the Bible. The Bible often talks about tongues, tribes, nations, peoples, but never race.

Constantine for once is actually correct here.

Call X or Y but racism has always existed. People thought that negros were subhuman and didnt have any rights and the discussion to give indios rights was huge in Spain. The meme that racism is a social construction is dumb.

>The idea that a race can be sub-human and biologically inferior is a 19th century invention.
False. Blacks were thought to be totally inferiror,and they werent included in the laws of indias unlike indios. Greeks discussed that they were superior to others,so did Romans.

I can't verify this at the moment, but I do believe this definition has existed for some time now, only recently making a resurgence due to new attitudes and views on the subject.

I always got the impression from Othello that the Venetians didn't like him because he was a Moor (which doesn't even mean that he is necessarily dark skinned), not specifically because of his race.

Even when they say something like, "the black Othello," it seems like the characters are referring more to his character than his literal skin colour.

IIRC, in Elizabethan England Othello was often performed by swarthy or tanned white actors rather than black-face actors.

The concept of human races do not exist or simply lacked the strength. Simply no one gave a damn.

The question changed the picture when it was a different culture.

The Saracens, in general, were pioneers in associating phenotypes with human behavior; the very word "race" comes from the Arabic. But the associations were usually made with environmental factors.

The Iberian racism will specifically come up with the stigma of Reconquista. Basically butthurt. The Castilians literally created a caste system of "purity of blood"; Portuguese disdained this system. Both, however, have turned to African slave labor-work with ecclesiastical permission. It was part of the Crusader ideal: Enslaving the infidel. Nothing related to "racial inferiority".

I don't think most humans centuries ago had enough breadth of the world to be racist as opposed to merely tribal. I don't think 'us versus them' is defined enough to qualify as racist.

The only way to say people was never racist is to redefine racism.

In day to day talk, racism is a very broad term that can be used in a lot of contexts. In your life you can and will be called racist for virtually everything you do that is related to a person that belongs to another group. You could call the ancients racist if you use this definition of racist.

They still had stereotypical looks for those cultures that could include "race". If you believe you can be racist against mexicans or hispanics, romans were racist.

Explain the castas in Spain.

It's a tentacruel, knave.

It says a lot, though, that the stereotypical moor evolved to become black. This is not an specific english thing, The flags of corsica and sardinia, both medieval, show moorish heads as black. And they knew very well that most moors were not black.

Othelo and those heads being black support that racism, although in a different shape, existed in the past. You change/exaggerate your enemies racial differences in the imaginarium to further emphasize how they're worst.

>the discussion to give indios rights was huge in Spain.

This. There was even a group that defended that indians were not human at all. Although apparently some scholars state that this was a strategy to defend them from conquest, since animals can't be evangelized and therefore conquistadors would lose the casus belli.

Except they believed christian indians and blacks to be inferior. Converted moors and their descendants were inferior too.

Agreed. -- "Racism rests on two basic assumptions: that a correlation exists between physical characteristics and moral qualities; that mankind is divisible into superior and inferior stocks. Racism, thus defined, is a modern conception, for prior to the XVIth century there was virtually nothing in the life and thought of the West that can be described as racist."

Prior to that, people were largely ethnocentric and xenophobic.

Ancient rome was more racist than we can imagine... you weren't considered a roman unless born in rome, from roman parents...

its a basic inherent human tendency, all populations that meet someone 'different' are rasist to each other, even among populations that seem to be realy similar theres biases and prejudices

for example, most eastern europeans arent actualy 'rasist' by western definition, but are xenophobic as fuck and literaly hate their nearest neighbours, cause history

so you literaly get right wingers and war veterans being friendly to people of diferent skin color, simply because they never fought them and know that serbs/croats ukranians/russians... arent black, so black is almost a neutral skin color to them
(at the same time they would probably hate it if their kids if they bred outside the race, but would disavow them or worse if they went with ''the enemy'' across the border)

its just human to be biased against ''others'' the same way its human to be paranoid about ''them'', comes down to neurology, and the bigger the external difference, both in basic phenotypal physiognomy but much more so in terms of culture and mentality, the bigger the negativ bias

class comes into it a lot as well

its just anthropic universals, written into us by biology, inescapable, even SJWs follow the exact same logic, 'us'- meaning logical sane correct humans, and those 'others'- meaning people who are just wrong, just inherently wrong and probably sick or disfunctional in some way that accounts for how wrong they are and automaticaly makes them inferior

the difference is merely in -how- this manifests, not -when-, or -whether-, it always manifests, without mistake

its unavoidable

we are all human... thats why

>Prior to that, people were largely ethnocentric and xenophobic.

That would probably be included under the banner of racism, though. Saying "I think that England should be inhabited only by endemic ethnic groups" or "The USA should be inhabited only by people of ethnic groups originating in western and/or northern Europe" will get you tarred and feathered as literally worse than Hitler.

Nah. Racism is a modern invention, from the Renaissance. Before that it didn't exist

It is your time to leave Veeky Forums =)

It is not that they were racist, it was that they were so racist that they would treat a frenchman the same way they treat a black man thus rendering racism meaningless.

>but aristocrats married foreigners
Classism replaced xenophobia in some cases.

Lawlessness was a problem in the past and you could barely trust your own family. This is why you had guilds which were almost like monastic brotherhoods rather than companies that hire people based on merit.

If you hire a stranger, give them silver and send them to another town to pick up an order, likely you're never going to see them or the silver again. Instead you hire your nephew or your brother in law or someone who has put in years and years as a journeyman and is part of your close knit community.

Nowadays we call this nepotism or discrimination. Back then it would be called common sense.

but, discrimination IS common sense

when you think about it the notion of rasism and race based slavery that went with it(basicaly the first was invented just to support the latter) is a sign of humanist development of western cultures of the time

a few hundred years before that they wouldnt even need that, they would just push any given available white poor people into slavery and kill them if they fought back, no questions asked

they couldnt do that any more in the 1600/700 hundreds, because human life suddenly meant something, also they were all ''fellow christians'', not that this topped people from mass slaughtering each other in religious wars but any way...

so they simply had to invent another cathegory, based on some exploitable difference

and that was skin color, language, culture, religion, geographic distance etc... its easy, look if you meet a subsaharan african it takes you a few days to even catch his emotional ques, the facial lines are all different, the mentality is unrecognisable, the only connecting factor is things like alchohol and obscenity

but realy its just a question of ''ours'' and ''theirs'' and thats expandable and contractable like a bit of rubber string