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Comment by hef19898 | Hacker News Reader

hef19898

Slavery, the US / American Colonies variety of it, was deeply rooted in racism. Slavery is gone, racism is still there. So I honestly don't see how the western world is doing a bad job at separating the two.

Let's face it, most of the founding fathers were racist slave owners.

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There are nuanced differences.

Slavery (as seen then) implies that the person you are enslaving as subhuman (remember the 3/5s compromise?). Most slave owners treated their slaves as investments like a farmer would treat a tractor today. In fact, for the really terrible work many slave owners would hire Irish immigrants to do the jobs they didn't want their slaves doing out of fear of the risk of harm to the person doing the job. They were tools, not humans.

Racism, which we have now (though probably to a much lesser degree than what some people would want you to believe) acknowledges that the other is human but is inferior due to skin color or ethnicity.

Bigotry is more cultural. The other is human, and should have all the rights thereof, but the bigot doesn't like the culture of the other person. This is called racism by contemporary standards, which is very wrong.

The 3/5 compromise is even worse than mere sub-human-ness. They were already not entitled to any human rights. Their owners also wanted them counted as human solely for the purpose of adding to their power in the Congress and Electoral College. So not only were they subhuman, but the goal was to make it even harder for people to grant them rights.

The opposition was to count them for 0. The "compromise" was to account them for "only" 3/5 -- not at "3/5 of a human" but "slave owners get that much thumb on the scale of all future votes".

That still wasn't sufficient to mollify them, and they ended up seceding, making it quite clear that their reason was to continue to own people.

They didn’t enslave people because they were racist, they enslaved people because it was effectively free labor. Sure, they chose Africans because they were racist and thought them savages, but that isn’t why the institution of slavery existed.

The institution of slavery didn't exist until they came to the New World. The medieval practice of serfdom was pretty brutal, but serfs were at least considered human.

Slavery was introduced in the New World and not in Europe, because that's where the non-Europeans were. When the native Americans proved poor slaves (among other things, dying in droves from disease and being better able to escape due to knowing the area), they imported slaves from Africa.

The Africans had been practicing slavery all along, but the Europeans had considered it barbaric until then. They still didn't tolerate it within Europe, but only safely out of sight in the New World. The institution of slavery only came into existence after colonizing places inhabited by people of other races.

Slavery played a huge role in antique Rome and Greece. Across the Mediterranean in fact. But that kind of slavery was very different from the cattle slavery practiced in the American colonies, especially the US. It was also much less routed in race, besides the POWs being enslaved.

Race has played a huge role in slavery throughout time, but to your point it depends on when and where that time is. My original point was someone can be racist without believing in slavery (and the other way around), and they can not like a particular culture/class without being racist. These differences are important because once we start making blanket statements about what people really think it only encourages that tribalism they're trying to fix in the first place.

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