Socio-Historical Impact of “Racism Is the Result of Slavery”
Kadeem Jackson U.S. History September 25,2009 Socio-Historical impact of “Racism Is The Result Of Slavery”
Human nature wants to cast people who are like oneself as better than people not like oneself. That bias requires very little encouragement when coupled with the tendency towards selective memory. This impairs the normal empathy that generally prevents people from casually harming their fellows. A little push from greed and viola. It ought to be observed that the vast majority of people sold into slavery from sub-Saharan Africa were captured and conveyed into the hands of European slavers by their fellow Africans. The tribes and nations of the old slave coast became wealthy and powerful through selling their neighbors into bondage. No racism there, just tribalism and opportunism. The centrality of slave driven industries and agriculture became a sort of economic addiction that encouraged the foment of hard line ideological racism. The bits in the old testament that cast slavery as benign and the parts about some people being born to serve the chosen people didn 't help matters any. Slavery and racism have always existed somewhat independently of one another, though one can surely be modified to serve the other. Both, concepts, however, come from a sort of cultural, or at least "classiest" arrogance. The earliest examples of slaves (pre biblical) refer to slaves drawn from within a population that requires slaves: usually indigents and criminals were taken. Once those people were used up, the societies in question (Egyptian, Roman, etc) began taking slaves from neighbors they 'd conquered in open warfare, but even in those situations, there was still a kind of "human resource pool" within the societies that depended on slaves. Only recently (comparatively so) did slavery begin to rely almost exclusively on members of another society, as with Africans and Europeans/Euro-Americans and in the more modern examples, latent seeds of
Human nature wants to cast people who are like oneself as better than people not like oneself. That bias requires very little encouragement when coupled with the tendency towards selective memory. This impairs the normal empathy that generally prevents people from casually harming their fellows. A little push from greed and viola. It ought to be observed that the vast majority of people sold into slavery from sub-Saharan Africa were captured and conveyed into the hands of European slavers by their fellow Africans. The tribes and nations of the old slave coast became wealthy and powerful through selling their neighbors into bondage. No racism there, just tribalism and opportunism. The centrality of slave driven industries and agriculture became a sort of economic addiction that encouraged the foment of hard line ideological racism. The bits in the old testament that cast slavery as benign and the parts about some people being born to serve the chosen people didn 't help matters any. Slavery and racism have always existed somewhat independently of one another, though one can surely be modified to serve the other. Both, concepts, however, come from a sort of cultural, or at least "classiest" arrogance. The earliest examples of slaves (pre biblical) refer to slaves drawn from within a population that requires slaves: usually indigents and criminals were taken. Once those people were used up, the societies in question (Egyptian, Roman, etc) began taking slaves from neighbors they 'd conquered in open warfare, but even in those situations, there was still a kind of "human resource pool" within the societies that depended on slaves. Only recently (comparatively so) did slavery begin to rely almost exclusively on members of another society, as with Africans and Europeans/Euro-Americans and in the more modern examples, latent seeds of