I'm sorry, but I think this episode totally missed the target. It just looking into things too much. Or to put it in net speak and to show my stress: "WTH!?" and "This is bull!"
How the hell did this thought process come to be!?
Sure racism was present, but seriously look at it from the perspective of coming to an exotic uncharted lands (or poorly charted) and having no clue about the history of the place but you see a bunch of nomads and (let's face it, and this I'm not using as a insulting term) primitive agricultural tribes - would you expect to find a big lost stone city? The hell you would.
In for example Europe, there are ruins, but there are also contemporary buildings on a massive scale, in southern and central Africa not so much (at least not at those times).
I guess thinking Acropolis in Athens or the Pyramids in Egypt are amazing work and I still find it hard to understand how they did it way back then...then that makes me a racist?
And with all that, the whole of Europe shows that history of a civilization is not always consistent in progress - for example the knowledge from the ancient cultures was even lost until renesansse and such. Cultures disappear all the time, the only problem (and mistake) would be to think there wasn't something before the current dominant culture that is seen - that does not make you a freaking racist.
Some times it is a whole different culture. You have to assume if there's a big city a few miles from you, all tangled in bushes, but you live in a hut, that you probably don't even know the city is there or are not occupying because of some other reason, it does however imply that you are not directly connected to it - does that mean you culture got more advanced or not, not really important, it points to being a change in your culture for sure.
The authors you mentioned wrote stories about "lost civilizations" and "lost cities" as much as on Mars or somewhere else. Thing is it's UNKNOWN and EXOTIC. And what is it to a regular person living in North American and European cultures? Well Africa and South and Central America and Eastern Asia. Most have never been there and the cultures are really different.
They didn't talk about lost cities (unless underground I guess) in Europe, because people knew what was in Europe, Europe was charted and explored and familiar.
Besides that, those were basically adventure and fantasy novels, that's not really racism, though there is I guess racism in their writings.
Zachary Amaranth said:
Of course, you're trying to retcon history by applying today's filters to things.
And Bob was not? He actually said it himself racism was just there in those times.