(03-08-2020, 08:37 AM)flsprtsgod Wrote: Race and Racism, societal not tribal, were born in the Middle Ages. Yes it was white people, no, they weren't Americans. Slavery is older than that.

Yes. One of the earliest written references to white people being "better" is in the Spanish Reconquista.  That started out as an effort to get Christians back in control instead of Muslims.  But it morphed into creating a new nobility of only the palest people, so that the Moors and Arabs would be excluded, regardless of if they had converted to Christianity.  But other than the Spanish, most Europeans weren't traveling more than a few miles from where they were born, and they weren't encountering anybody with a different skin color than them. They didn't have an opinion about such people, good or bad.

In those days, the life of a rural peasant would sometimes be almost as bad as slavery, because they were not allowed to leave their master's land and they had to work when the master said "work". The lives of urban workers were tangled up in the guild system. A young man would start off as an apprentice in his father's profession, but once he graduated to journeyman and then to master, he had a lot of freedom to decide what clients he wanted and how quickly he would work. But a rural peasant had nothing to graduate to.

In those days, Africans and native Americans were conquering each other and enslaving their prisoners, but Europeans hadn't done that for about a thousand years. When Columbus arrived to the new world, he tried to treat the natives similar to how peasants were treated in Spain (which is not good, but also not slavery). But it didn't take long before the Europeans coming after Columbus noticed how the natives and the Africans treated each other, and decided to join in. And the Spanish concept of white supremacy played into it, and spread to the Portuguese. About 100 years later the Dutch, French, and English joined in.

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