(Feb 13, 2018 11:17 PM)Leigha Wrote: [ -> ]I wonder why whites were long considered the superior race, to people of color? Why would anyone assume superiority simply due to color, race, etc over another race? What started from a genetic origin, it turned eventually to a social construct to control certain populations. (it seems)
Thoughts?
Traceable to an historical mixture and overlapping of many elements too numerous to completely account for here. Including borrowing from the age-old template of social classes ranging from nobility to the working poor being treated as hereditary. (The momentum of that caste snobbery was still going on among "palefaces" themselves after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.)
Richard Henry Pratt introduced the word "racism" in 1902 (he was ironically a quasi-hater of indigenous North Americans). Fittingly in terms of past influences, he even suggested a tie-up between class and race:
"Segregating any class or race of people apart from the rest of the people kills the progress of the segregated people or makes their growth very slow. Association of races and classes is necessary to destroy racism and classism."
The earliest recorded instance of an European indirectly referring to other Europeans as "white people" was in 1612 by playwright Thomas Middleton, as used in his play "The Triumphs of Truth". Even in that context there was no trumpeting of Europeans being superior to non-Europeans; and the fictional character introducing the expression was an African king.
While there was technically no "white race" and no "racism" in that era and before, there was abundant ethnocentrism at the level of tribe, nation, or situated populations / communities engaging in self-adoration. Which is to say, many if not most scattered civilizations around the globe entertained that their culture was superior to others, including the Chinese. Similar to the latter, the ancient Greeks viewed certain non-Greeks as barbarians. To Aristotle is ascribed the view that barbarians had a disposition which was amenable to slavery, since they were either feral in behavior or natively lacked a concept of freedom. Also, some itinerant groups of people became universally stereotyped as uncouth, untrustworthy, or conniving stock by the multiple societies they ventured into (Jews, gypsies, etc might be examples applicable to Europe centuries later).
Indentured slavery of both whites and people of color dominated early colonial America. Both were freed and admissible to citizenship after serving their period. When the flow of contracted servants from Britain and elsewhere subsided significantly (and their mortality became too high to tolerate), there was a shift to institutionalized slavery based on physiological characteristics or geographic origin. (Full ownership, perpetual status as property, and procedural breeding would offer a more reliable supply of labor.) To ensure the survival of the institution and its evasion of ethical judgements, the former European version of ethnocentrism was revamped to center on bodily features -- rather than culture, customs, or nationality being a "prior to observed behavior" indicator of barbarism (deficiency in moral discipline as well as intellectual inferiority). Thereby a thought orientation equivalent to racism developed and flourished beyond the confines of just slavery operation (but lacking that specific, not yet invented term) .
The spread of proto-racism converged with the ethnocentric pride which various societal states had pompously paraded for themselves over the millennia. In that "game", the advanced technology and the conquests of colonial imperialism later provided the seed for a distorted / misapprehended view of a specific combo of civilization and race having thus validated an inherent superiority (i.e, Western, European, "white people", Christianity, etc). Propaganda from the victors and their allies among the subdued or "commercially managed" populations flowered into the rest.
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