HellbirdIV said:
San Martin said:
I'm sure you're already aware of this, but in most of the examples you cited it's generally the case that the victims are enslaved by people of a similar skin colour (for example white Nazis force other, mostly white, people to work), so from a that point of view, it's not so easy to start lobbing racial insults at each other.
If you assume that the only ethnic differences are "White", "Black" and "Asian". In reality, there are hundreds (possibly thousands, I can't recall) of separate ethnic groups of wildly varying appearances and cultural heritage.
For example, Greeks would enslave Slavs (where the word comes from), Romans enslaved Germanics and Gauls, Egyptians enslaved Jews - these ethnicities all look similar, but are distinct from one-another for various reasons.
Sorry, I didn't express myself clearly enough. I apologise in advance for my excessive use of quotation marks; it's simply to express that "black" and "white" are artificial divisions which I don't consider to have biological significance.
I'm of course aware that "black" and "white" are both terms which describe hundreds of ethnic groups. What I'm trying to argue is that popular culture doesn't generally differentiate between them at a broad level, instead preferring these blanket terms. For example, I am Anglo-Saxon, and recognise that my ethnicity isn't exactly the same as a Slav's, or a Hispanic's. However, we are all "white". Likewise, different groups of people who are all generally conidered to be "black" don't claim to be one and the same. Or to take a different example outside of this debate, the Mapuche and the Quechua are entirely distinct ethnicities, but at the broadest level they'd both be called "Native American".
What I'm getting at is that it's harder for people to insult each other on racial terms when they're all of more or less the same skin tone (though not impossible, just look at the amount of racism shown to the Jews by other "whites"), whereas in the context of slavery in the USA, the simple fact that the oppresors and the oppressed had such differently coloured skin made it very easy to discriminate between them based purely on physical appearance.
There are two final points I'd like to make. Firstly, since the black/white divide is the most immediately relevant form of racism to US culture, and since it is precisely US culture which is most disseminated throughout the world through TV and cinema, it makes perfect sense that this issue should be more universally visible that other problems which rarely receive media attention outside their own country. Secondly, I would argue that the slavery you mentioned which was practised by the Romans, the ancient Egyptians, and during the Middle Ages, all happened so long ago that no one nowadays is likely feel a personal connection to them, so any racial conflicts which were involved back then become meaningless to anyone who doesn't study them academically.
Overall I'm not disagreeing with you. I think you made a valid point.
