macphanatic wrote:
Racism isn't limited to a section of the US or the US. It's global. There are groups within races that are racist against the rest of their race.
Last time I checked, the US wasn't the only country to have slaves. Slavery existed way before Europeans made landfall on the North American continent. Many countries had slaves at one point during their history. And it wasn't just whites that had slaves in the US. Native Americans and African Americans had slaves as well. There's a long history of people mistreating others.
Slavery has, indeed, existed at many times and at many places across the globe.
Chattel slavery based on
race - which as a category of human was created by European policy-makers
after the beginning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade - is unique to the modern era. In earlier times, observers often noted the skin color of other people, as they noted their languages, customs, and cultural attitudes and practices. People were known by groups we now call 'ethnicities,' which are geographically and historically connected populations that share an identity. Not until Europeans needed justification for their enslavement of Africans and indigenous Americans did the modern category of 'race' come into being.
The uniqueness of the development of modern chattel slavery meant that as the creation of the race 'Negro' was constructed to include all dark-skinned people of sub-Saharan Africa, it was exactly that category of people that was bought and trafficked to the Americas. Critics often say claim moral equivalency between the European slave traders and their African counterparts - 'they sold their own people into slavery,' people say. But this is nonsense. The Africans had no sense of shared identity with the people they sold across the sea - they sold people from
other ethnic groups - people as (if not more) different to one another as Ecuadorans and Peruvians are today. There was no idea of 'Black people' as a group among Africans. It just didn't exist in their cultures - that category was created by Europeans.
There is no moral equivalency. What Europeans did by accompanying the trans-Atlantic slave trade with the creation of the legal, pseudo-scientific, and cultural of 'race' was one of the most destructive campaigns ever waged by one group of people against others.