From 1619 to 2019: 400 years of racial progress?

[2PhiloVoid]

In the American context, racism is quite distinct from merely the human tendency to favor the in-group.

Let's put it this way, in the Middle Ages, Europeans had no special antipathy towards black people, nor did they necessarily think they were all ignoramouses and moral degenerates only cut out for playing sports or making white people laugh. Indeed, some such as St. Maurice were considered paragons of chivalrous virtue. But once colonialism and nationalism got underway as the dominant mythologies, suddenly all kinds of rationalizations were discovered for forcibly hauling black people across the Atlantic in chains.

Yep. And I wonder which folks back in the Middle Ages contributed the most to the spread of fallacious cultural interpretations upon people of other ethnicities, and what ideas moved them to do so?

 

[Ana the Ist]

I'm only writing in the context of my OP, and I meant the former. Jesus and Paul were not racist, and neither was Peter.

That's a bit of a red herring then....since the concept of race as we know it didn't exist back then.

You could literally say the same of everyone from Jesus's time.

Ok. I see I'm being to general here. Let's just talk "ideals" or "essential principles" that may be inherent to and help to strongly drive an ideology, such as racism....such as the idea that White folks are somehow 'better' than folks of any other ethnicity. Is that better?

Lol not really...

Is there some examples of this outside of the membership of a handful of white supremacist groups?

Are those groups what you've been talking about the entire time? Because I honestly thought you were referring to a much more widespread type of racism.

You're forgetting something; we're talking about the history of various ideological (even religious) developments that have formerly shaped social patterns in the U.S. over the past 400 years.

You seem like you're digging for a very specific answer here...I just don't know what it is.

It's not as if there's some mystery as to the origin of the ideas regarding race....it just doesn't have much (if anything) to do with racism today.

The short version is it all goes back to Enlightenment era Europeans and the changes in worldview they were going through culturally....while at the same time expanding across the globe. Basically ,for millennia, all nations and cultures had supernatural/mystical explanations for why their in-group was better than a particular out-group. Explanations like "they have sex with animals....worship demons....drink blood....etc". Explanations not born from facts....but from superstition and myth.

Enlightenment Europeans however, were increasingly convinced that rational, natural, fact based explanations existed for everything. When crossing the globe in search of exotic foreign lands with cities of gold was met with the reality of culture after culture that seemed stuck in the past, primitive, or otherwise unsophisticated....natural, rational explanations were sought. The commonality between the people of these various cultures was that they were of different skin tones than Europeans....although consistently darker. Thus, the concept of "race" was more or less born. Things were added and subtracted from the concept of race over time....with some aspects lingering on into even the mid-late 1900s. However as science kept disproving these aspects over time, and understanding of genetics increased, race eventually fell out of the realm of science and is now understood to be a strictly social distinction.

That's how it happened....that's where it comes from. Does that make sense?

 

[FireDragon76]

Racism as we know it is largely an artifact of colonialism but we shouldn't discount things like the papal Doctrine of Discovery or the role that primitive scientific institutions played in promulgating the idea of race in the first place.

 

[Ana the Ist]

Yep. And I wonder which folks back in the Middle Ages contributed the most to the spread of fallacious cultural interpretations upon people of other ethnicities

Well Chinese isolationism during that era was built largely upon the idea that the best of everything....people, animals, food, buildings, craftsmen, art, scholarship, etc....was in China and therefore the rest of the world wasn't worth dealing with.

Even during the middle ages, China was one of the biggest nations (geographically and population). Is that what you mean by "widespread"?

and what ideas moved them to do so?

See above.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

Well Chinese isolationism during that era was built largely upon the idea that the best of everything....people, animals, food, buildings, craftsmen, art, scholarship, etc....was in China and therefore the rest of the world wasn't worth dealing with.

Even during the middle ages, China was one of the biggest nations (geographically and population). Is that what you mean by "widespread"?



See above.

No, that's not what I was getting at. But, regardless, do you have any comments or evaluations about the OP article?

 

[essentialsaltes]

We might want to see if we can find out who the judge presiding over the grand jury was in that case, because as your document notes, the comment you've posted above was his 'opinion,' which leaves me to think that he had terrible hermeneutical ability, next to nil even.

Where in the Bible would people get that idea from? (sorry if you posted it earlier and I missed it.)

A modern day opponent of interracial marriage explains a bit more, but still not very substantive.

"I was raised in a Southern Baptist church and I have been taught to believe, and it makes a lot of sense to me, that God created all these different races and if he had wanted them all commingled into one race, he would have done it himself," Cleveland said. "Why did he create all these races, if he didn't mean for us to be separated by race?"

 

[durangodawood]

A modern day opponent of interracial marriage explains a bit more, but still not very substantive.

"I was raised in a Southern Baptist church and I have been taught to believe, and it makes a lot of sense to me, that God created all these different races and if he had wanted them all commingled into one race, he would have done it himself," Cleveland said. "Why did he create all these races, if he didn't mean for us to be separated by race?"

Good grief. People can be soooo dumb.

 

[FireDragon76]

A modern day opponent of interracial marriage explains a bit more, but still not very substantive.

"I was raised in a Southern Baptist church and I have been taught to believe, and it makes a lot of sense to me, that God created all these different races and if he had wanted them all commingled into one race, he would have done it himself," Cleveland said. "Why did he create all these races, if he didn't mean for us to be separated by race?"

This man's logic makes atheism look very attractive.

 

[Ana the Ist]

No, that's not what I was getting at. But, regardless, do you have any comments or evaluations about the OP article?

Yeah...didn't you see my earlier posts?