Comment on Would racism in the USA still exist if humans had automated robots in the 1800s?

Libra@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

No, for two reasons:

  1. The racism of the 1800s was built on that of the 1700s and the 1600s. Slavery as an institution was almost 250 years old when the civil war happened, so that kind worldview doesn’t get built overnight and it doesn’t evaporate overnight.
  2. The south resisted industrialization because slave labor was cheaper, already represented a significant investment, and didn’t require scrapping and investing a bunch more money to build factories and such. Plus the south doesn’t benefit from things like the Great Lakes as a transport network so industrialization was never going to take off there anyway until the transport barrier could be overcome with trains and later trucks. But even with those things, the South is considerably less industrialized than the Midwest. Looking at this map you can see that even today the ‘industrial regions’ in the South are still almost all along major rivers and near good natural harbors.

So even if robots had been ready for widespread commercial adoption in the 1800s they would still have represented a significant investment to transition from a slave-economy, probably wouldn’t have achieved widespread adoption, and thus probably wouldn’t have displaced many slaves. But even if that wasn’t the case the racism that came alongside slavery was already well-established, and as the Jim Crow era showed, once slaves were no longer the backbone of the economy they were relegated to second-class-citizen status and much, much worse. Another 60 years wouldn’t have made that big a difference (and don’t point to the last 60 years as evidence of what can change in that time, the way racism has changed in the US in that period has largely been a product of technological advancement in TV, internet, etc exposing folks to different people and ideas.)

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