[breathesgelatin]

Originally Posted by Elephant Walk

What I'm trying to say (and it's a hard point to get across I think) is that N. America didn't just suddenly create the current racism. It's been there all along.

An important thing worth noting:
If N. America did indeed "create" the current style of racism as has been claimed, this only stems from the fact that for the first time ever people of different racial backgrounds on a large scale. Perhaps there are countries and periods which can contradict but I can't think of any off the top of my head. Europe has always (and still is mostly) homogenous. The countries with the greatest amount of overt racism (in my opinion, Italy and Spain) are also the countries with some of the highest African immigrant populations.

The way you state this, you act as if we are blaming current North Americans for creating the model we're discussing. Actually, we're not--we just have to deal with it. I suppose we might say that the model was created by Europeans and Euroamericas based on experiences and encounters in North America. That might be more accurate than saying "created in North America." I don't know. You're fairly wrong about people not encountering racial or ethnic others until the age of exploration. For example, the Roman Empire was an incredibly ethnically and racially diverse nation which had a considerable amount of tolerance for these differences. To take two examples, think of Paul (a Jew) who was also a Roman citizen. Also think of the numerous military commanders in the late Empire from Gaul & Western Europe (a true cultural backwater of the Roman Empire) whose ethnic groups were mocked in contemporary literature and yet rose through military ranks to leadership and sometimes even Imperial office... The point being that they didn't create "race." 17th & 18th century Europeans had a tremendous desire to understand the world by categorizing and classifying people, idea, and things. I can point you to literally hundreds of sources about this. Thus they began categorizing people on various points including race. The system of slavery was a phenomenon that helped to ensure that Africans were categorized as "inferior." Yet the same system and ideas that took hold in these areas did not take hold everywhere, even places that had slavery. (As indicated by the Brazilian counterexample I brought up and you dismissed.)

As a scholar of Europe, I actually disagree with you on Italy and Spain being the most racist. I would argue that France is probably more so. I study France...

And as a sad side note, I was traveling in the Northeastern part of the city today and found a shack with four Confederate flags on it. The racists here use the Confederate flag to overtly show racism. It's sad that a beautiful tradition is mangled in this way.

OK... I'm glad you recognize how racists use this symbol.

Perhaps it's semantics, but I agree that "beliefs" are exchanged and exported through literary and through force, not ideas.

So there are never any new ideas, only new beliefs? This doesn't make any sense to me, unless you're just going to randomly categorize anything that's new as a "belief" and anything you perceive to be persistent throughout time as an "idea." Then it makes it easy to claim ideas never change. Besides, for any idea to affect society, at least someone must believe it. Ideas which are universally dismissed are usually not discussed, written about, or exchanged.

I still haven't seen you state evidence to support your claim that the "idea" of race has never changed throughout time or across space. Certainly people have treated each other poorly, oppressed one another, held slaves, committed atrocities, etc. throughout time. I agree with you there. I also agree that people doing this based on ethnic, cultural, and religious differences has been fairly persistent across time. But race specifically is an idea and construct that really did not exist before the advent of North American chattel slavery. Did medieval Europeans who happened to encounter sub-Saharan Africans consider them as other? Yes. But not because they perceived them to be a member of a particular "race" that was inherently different. In fact, there's evidence that they judged them many times on a religious basis. They feared many of the rituals of African religion and compared them to their own ideas about witchcraft in Europe. Early on in the institution of Portuguese slavery, there was an idea that if a slave converted to Christianity he was freed. This didn't last for long of course because the masters quickly realized that the slaves could convert (or claim to convert) to get their freedom. (Although many African converts continued to practice African religious rituals alongside Christian ones.) Early explorers like Vasco da Gama were constantly looking for rumored Christian peoples in East Africa and India, hoping that they would help Europeans in crusades against Islam. They took quite a while to find the Ethiopian Christians, but they did manage to find some of the native Indian Christian population.... Vasco da Gama was constantly killing Muslims and less frequently Hindus - he was not a very nice guy. But yet he had the idea that if he met other Christians, even if not of his skin color, they would be his allies. This idea was pretty much defunct by the 18th century - although obviously new religious movements of the 18th century (Methodist, Moravianism, etc.) began to revive the idea of the equality of believers in some sense and became active in the early abolitionist movement.