is pre-columbian racism a myth?

[noble brown]

Normally I don't get caught unawares when it comes to the history of racism. But just recently someone replied to me something to the effect that "its a common myth that racism started with European expansion". I did a quick Google search but realized it was going to take more than that to fully investigate. I don't have much time working as much as I do and it's been awhile since I've been in my studies, unfortunately. So I pose the question to my comrades to give me a few starting points and basically check the temperature on this shit.

I suspect that we are defining racism differently. He gave as an example the fact that Jews claim to be the chosen people of their god. I'm not sure that this qualifies as racism proper though. So in addition to the first question, does anyone perceive a significant change in the expression or manifestations of pre-columbian racism to post?

[mushroompizza]

Racism has existed way before the Atlantic Triangle Trade. India has divided its populous into castes by skin color since the beginning of Hinduism. In the Bible it says black people are descendants of a man cursed to be black for his sins. Racism is rumored to have developed in Europe because of the threat of Islam, people began to view Muslims as enemies and soon their stereotypical dark skin.

[Rafiq]

There was no "racism" as such, because there was seldom a real concept of race in most societies that was anywhere close to ours. For example, the Arabs in Baghdad adhered to the Greek idea of the inferiority, or superiority of a people depending on their temperate zone. Surprise surprise, the Mediterranean zone, which included the Levant, North Africa, and Southern Europe (Greece, Italy, etc.) was considered to be where the superior people's dwell, while those who lived in extreme climates either in Northern Europe or Africa were thought to be barbarous peoples. The Romans viewed blonde hair as a physical defect and the Germanic, Gaullic populations were thought to be only useful for manual labor, while more learned slaves were to be derived from Greece.

So this has always more or less been in history (though no evidence of it in pre-history, I would guess), but the difference is that it was radically different than our idea of races today.

[Invader Zim]

As Rafiq notes, it depends on what is considered to be "racism", racism as we understand it today is a modern concept with its own pseudo-scientific underpinnings born of Enlightenment-era thought and 19th Century conceptions of science retro-actively fitted to humanity to justify historical and contemporary attitudes towards various groups of "others". So, racial discrimination on the basis it exists today does indeed not really date back only to around the period of 1492. Though, the basis for enslaving sub-Saharan Africans and the indigenous populations of the Americas was not based on "racial" concepts but religious. The excuse for enslaving them was that they did not worship the Abrahamic God, not because their skin colour was different. That grew up around the institution of slavery.

However, there are those who will suggest that because modern concepts of racism became institutionalised, and with that more sophisticated, in the modern period the basic precepts of racism did not exist before the advent of early modernity. That isn't the case. There are plenty of examples of historical figures and communities judging the "quality" of humanity based on cosmetic differences derived from their ethnicity and, in turn, associating various regions of the globe with a certain type of humanity. Primitive though it was, it strikes me as unnecessary and obfuscating to suggest that this was not racism. Technically, it wasn't, but save for semantic dispute or the purely academic it makes no odds.

[mushroompizza]

A better word would be prejudice based on skin/hair/culture if you want to really look into it

[noble brown]

A better word would be prejudice based on skin/hair/culture if you want to really look into it

How so?

[Jimmie Higgins]

A better word would be prejudice based on skin/hair/culture if you want to really look into it

Probably all class societies depend on some kind of "us vs them" ideology to unite classes within one ruling order and to justify competition between different ruling cliques.

But, yes, this is very different than modern racism as an ideology. Modern racism developed out of a need to organize colonial rule and then to organize and control large heterogeneous labor pools needed for industrialization.

The problem with conflating modern racism with older forms of prejudice comes when you want to organize effectively against modern racism. Basically the "well prejudice has always existed" is the same as when people say "capitalists are just greedy and there's always greed". It ignores the system and universalizes the specific conditions and effects of the modern system in an a-historical way.

If it;s just "human nature" then I guess racism can't be ended so we hafta be liberal reformists and just try and moderate it - or worse, we hafta fight for "our race" or some other group will dominate us since racism is "inherent".

[Sibotic]

It might be misleading to represent such early conflicts as apart from 'racial considerations,' etc., given that the God at issue was a racial God in any case. Not, of course, to say anything about the race of the God in question, as such. If anything further racism did at least tend to treat the others as in some sense in common religiously and so on, despite religions at times justifying this until later, while this did eventually create a sense of tension between them and so on, in addition interfering with their religious beliefs and otherwise directly and in an obvious way, as well as overlapping with nationalisms - similarly divided and at times seemingly arbitrarily - and so on which help create a frequently false sense of identity, in racial terms that is.

[bcbm]

Modern racism developed out of a need to organize colonial rule and then to organize and control large heterogeneous labor pools needed for industrialization.

colonial rule yes, but i would say more out of the slave trade than industrialization with sugar, tobacco and cotton being essential outputs of the colonies requiring massive indentured or enslaved populations