Comment on Would racism in the USA still exist if humans had automated robots in the 1800s?
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Racism existed before slavery. It just changes focus and details in different places at different times. Might not be “race” based in the way we have today, based in arbitrary skin color lines, but prejudice against a given group absolutely is a human failing.
Slavery was as much a product of racism as it was a generator of the current brand of racism that exists in the US. Well, slavery in this context, I’m not well enough versed in older forms to be confident in how much of those were built on the same kind of prejudice. For all I know, Roman slaves may not have been taken based in prejudices the way Africans in specific were during the cross Atlantic slave trade. But those Africans were absolutely considered lesser before the trade got going. And that was absolutely a major factor in the slave trade’s origins.
Robots, you might have reduced or eliminated the slave trade, but it wouldn’t have done a damn thing about racism. There’s always some group that’s going to be a target, and the sheer arrogance of European colonizers would have found even more emphasis on anti-native racism than what they had to begin with. Or the Irish, or the Chinese, or whoever else ended up being at the bottom of their perceived scale of humanity.
You won’t see the end of racism until we see the end of race mattering at all, and even then you won’t eliminate the underlying drives that generate racism.