Comment by nostromo
4 years ago
None of this is uniquely American. Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, Australia, Africa, etc. all have unique but similar histories of genocide and enslavement. And it was happening in the Americas long before any Europeans arrived too.
On the contrary, enslaving a specific skin-color is relatively recent invention. Although the concept of slavery is old, the way slavery was applied is relatively new. America also held onto the enslavement of a specific skin-color most recently, and like I said, there are still people alive who were legally barred from voting purely because of their identified skin color.
Is it any more or any less racist to enslave people on skin color vs nationality? The romans enslaved germanic peoples. I feel like this is the same amount of racism as anything else.
Roman notions of slavery were very different from American notions of slavery. Rome did not fight a civil war to continue enslaving a specific group of people, nor did Rome largely declare all germanic people everywhere to be natural slaves of Rome, which was the way Americans viewed their slavery.
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