Comment by xeromal
4 years ago
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.
4 years ago
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.
> nor did Rome largely declare all germanic people everywhere to be natural slaves of Rome, which was the way Americans viewed their slavery.
Aristotle believed that the majority of human beings were "slaves by nature"–by their in-born constitution fit only for slavery. Many Romans wholeheartedly embraced Aristotle's thesis. No doubt they would have thought the vast majority of Germanic people fit that category.
I think you're missing the point I'm trying to make by ignoring how race wasn't developed as a tool to propagate and justify enslavement in Rome in order to explain why America, which is a country that did use race to propagate and justify enslavement for over a century and then went to civil war explicitly to keep a specific race enslaved, has constant race conversations. Why are you doing that?
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