Would racism in the USA still exist if humans had automated robots in the 1800s?

Submitted ⁨⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

If you look at how the USA has progressed, the south is STILL stuck in certain trends that affect current day society. It’s why they’re the bible belt, but states like Arizona and California aren’t reffered to as “the south”.

Geographically it makes no sense. California, Arizona, New Mexico, they’re all geographically south, but that’s not what that means.

And racism in the south is just so much more amplified than it is in other states. When you think about it, the 1860s are not THAT long ago in terms of societies.

I think we’re still being affected by actions from those times. A family experiences hardship. So they raise their kid to not trust those that caused it. And that kid grows up and does the same. Without a break in the chain, it just perpetuates more of the same.

So we’re only about 8 generations removed from that time. It’s really not that much. And OBVIOUSLY slavery is going to cause racism.

But what if the slaves were left on Africa, and the plantation owners just had automated drones that did all the work?

What would racism today look like?

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Comments

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sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Skin is just a lazy way of seeing “the other”. If we all, worldwide, collectively fucked our way to a uniform pigment, we would just find another way to define “the other”.

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- rikudou@lemmings.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Easy to see in EU, Slavic people are seen as less than, even though we’re as white as everyone else around and in the particular case of my country, we have more Germanic genes than Slavic, but hey, prejudices don’t need to make sense.
  
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- lordnikon@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Yep that happens all the time in east Asia. Be it different shades or castes.
  
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- Bongles@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Yep, even happened in the US with Italians and such.
  
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TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
See what’s going on in European countries that haven’t used significant numbers of African slaves. You know, it’s possible to enslave your own population too. Anyway, there’s definitely racism in Europe, even though the history with regard to using African slaves is completely different. Nowadays, racists hate all foreigners regardless of skin color.

Actually, people seem to gravitate towards this weird sort of tribalism when the in-group and out-group are pretty arbitrary concepts. It doesn’t even have to be based on skin color, language or religion. People just hate other people because they were born in the wrong town.

If America never used any African slaves at all, normal human tribalism would still be there to mess things up. There would be groups based on arbitrary things that slang, facial features, dietary preferences, fashion choices etc. Racism wouldn’t disappear. It would just be aimed at some other group.

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Godnroc@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Well, racism is not, unfortunately, either a recent invention or an exclusive ideology either. As an example, the stereotype of a drunk Irishman is a racist stereotype that was also common in America’s history. If you can define a group of people, chances are there is a stereotype about them.

The one that sticks in my head is “gypped” for getting screwed over is based on gypsies and is the equivalent of saying “jewed” for some other people. Either one is a racist stereotype, but I didn’t realize the first wasn’t just a common term until it was pointed out to me.

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- Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  One that I didn’t know about was the pronounciation of “Arab”.
  
  I’ve heard “air-ab” and I’ve heard “a-rab”. I thought they were both just different pronounciations. Turns out “a-rab” is offensive, and racist. I literally grew up being babysat as a kid by a family of arabs, and didn’t find this out until I was 28.
  
  I have no memory of if I ever pronounced the word wrong around any of them, and now I cringe looking back. I must not have offended them. They always accepted me as one of their own.
  
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  - JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    That must depend on location, here in the UK it’s only ever pronounced a-rub (u is the the oo in foot)
    
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nebulaone@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Racism might unfortunately be natural and an evolutionary advantage, since mistrusting other tribes could save your life, therefore passing on this trait when reproducing.

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- throwawayacc0430@sh.itjust.works ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I’m biased against Arch Linux users 👀
  
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  - nebulaone@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    :(
    
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Libra@lemmy.ml ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
No, for two reasons:

The racism of the 1800s was built on that of the 1700s and the 1600s. Slavery as an institution was almost 250 years old when the civil war happened, so that kind worldview doesn’t get built overnight and it doesn’t evaporate overnight.

The south resisted industrialization because slave labor was cheaper, already represented a significant investment, and didn’t require scrapping and investing a bunch more money to build factories and such. Plus the south doesn’t benefit from things like the Great Lakes as a transport network so industrialization was never going to take off there anyway until the transport barrier could be overcome with trains and later trucks. But even with those things, the South is considerably less industrialized than the Midwest. Looking at this map you can see that even today the ‘industrial regions’ in the South are still almost all along major rivers and near good natural harbors.

So even if robots had been ready for widespread commercial adoption in the 1800s they would still have represented a significant investment to transition from a slave-economy, probably wouldn’t have achieved widespread adoption, and thus probably wouldn’t have displaced many slaves. But even if that wasn’t the case the racism that came alongside slavery was already well-established, and as the Jim Crow era showed, once slaves were no longer the backbone of the economy they were relegated to second-class-citizen status and much, much worse. Another 60 years wouldn’t have made that big a difference (and don’t point to the last 60 years as evidence of what can change in that time, the way racism has changed in the US in that period has largely been a product of technological advancement in TV, internet, etc exposing folks to different people and ideas.)
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southsamurai@sh.itjust.works ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Racism existed before slavery. It just changes focus and details in different places at different times. Might not be “race” based in the way we have today, based in arbitrary skin color lines, but prejudice against a given group absolutely is a human failing.

Slavery was as much a product of racism as it was a generator of the current brand of racism that exists in the US. Well, slavery in this context, I’m not well enough versed in older forms to be confident in how much of those were built on the same kind of prejudice. For all I know, Roman slaves may not have been taken based in prejudices the way Africans in specific were during the cross Atlantic slave trade. But those Africans were absolutely considered lesser before the trade got going. And that was absolutely a major factor in the slave trade’s origins.

Robots, you might have reduced or eliminated the slave trade, but it wouldn’t have done a damn thing about racism. There’s always some group that’s going to be a target, and the sheer arrogance of European colonizers would have found even more emphasis on anti-native racism than what they had to begin with. Or the Irish, or the Chinese, or whoever else ended up being at the bottom of their perceived scale of humanity.

You won’t see the end of racism until we see the end of race mattering at all, and even then you won’t eliminate the underlying drives that generate racism.

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mutual_ayed@sh.itjust.works ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
We’d be racists against robots. There’s always an out group. If not, capitalism cannot keep it’s hold.

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- adorno_h8s_ur_jazz_meme@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I think this is correct. Racism didn’t start, nor was it exclusive to, the South. The South was a largely fascist style totalitarianism for black people until the 1960’s, but this was one instantiation of a worldwixe view. Racialized capitalism has remained with cosmetic facelifts. The South was part of a much wider shift in European thought in the 15th and 16th centuries towards a racial world. Modern conceptions of race arose to justify exploitation, taken from things like “Purity of the Blood” to differentiate Christian converts post Reconquista from older Christians. So they could continue discriminating. When conquering the Americas and enslaving Africans they ran into the same issue. Justifying war and brutality along Christian lines becomes quite muddled after their children grow up having been born and raised Christian. So the idea was that they carried heathenism in their blood. Easy, now perpetual, hereditary bondage has a justification. Capitalism arose concurrently with Imperialism and the Enlightenment. So this racialized worldview, with massive economic incentive, became standardized, secularized, “rationalized”, eventually becoming eugenics and Nazi race science.
  
  During this same time, there was mass exploitation and genocide on a global scale. It was not the Confederacy that eradicated entire tribes, forced assimilation, occupied Haiti, opportunistically betrayed the Phillipines by annexing it and brutally putting down the same freedom movement they had fought alongside the year prior- and promised independence. Nor was it the Confederacy nor Jim Crow that annexed Hawaii by force, in the name of fruit companies. The list goes on.
  
  It is very easy to imagine the north as this mercantile utopia of small businessmen, fishing and trading and fiercely defending liberty. There was certainly a real strand of Enlightenment thought througb the Am. Rev. that was actually emancipatory, anti slavery, property, and capital. The Constitution was very much a reactionary document, meant to centralize and consolidate power in the hands of the new elite, North and South. Bourgeois rights to trade and property became instilled as the preeminent rights, any thought of social tranformation died in Shay’s Rebellion.
  
  Telling is the fact that Whigs opposed the Bill of Rights out of fear they would be read as exhaustive, and used to delimit the barebones conception of liberty by excluding everything not written. Hell, they even threw in an amendment explicitly stating “dipshits, these aren’t the only rights, they are examples”. And now those who claim to be defending the original text and intent betray the explicit intent by deferring to state power whenever they possibly can. The only amendment that gets completely written off is the inconvenient one that says the BOR should be a starting point. They call it too vague, funny because that was the entire point. To say “hey, use your judgement to protect liberty, think expansively, we are literally just some guys, we don’t even have The Simpsons”.
  
  Anyways, the Northern business interests did not particularly care one fuck about slavery, and they brutalized every wave of immigrant labor they could to turn Southern cotton into fabric(so did England, without the massive financial returns of Southern cotton the Industrial Revolution would’ve been dead in the water).
  
  But the abolitionist movement began to turn the population against the evils of slavery. The progressive middle class and freedmen eventually turned the North to abolition. Now there is an idea that Republicans and Democrats magically “switched positions” after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Well yes and no. The Republicans were always the party of the wealthy. They gained the support of Northern industrialists that saw slavery as inefficient when compared to treating labor like a market- also catastrophically exploitative. The North has been profoundly racist as well, if not so overtly.
  
  Very telling is how immigrants were categorized racially. When they were an oppressed working class, they were segregated and painted as racially inferior. The Irish largely treated like the Jim Crow South. Papist, non Germanic, Celtic, swine. As the Irish gained voting power and moved into the middle class, and the Nativists needed their support to exploit the New Immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe… congrats Paddys! You’re white now! Now lets oppress the Mongoloid Italians and Russians and of course Jews.
  
  What this demonstrates is racism was not an independent force of spite. It was, and still is, an economic weapon.
  
  When thinking about race in the North, keep in mind they had a muuuch smaller black population than Louisiana. If they so had majority black populations in mist areas I imagine it would’ve looked largely similar to Jim Crow. During the Great Migration blacks were forced into shitty neighborhoods, could only work specific jobs, and were still subjected to mass violence. The Black Panthers started in Oakland and soread largely to Northern cities. Huey Newton was assassinated by the FBI and Chicago PD. This is the heart of your question, and I think the answer. Imagining capitalism as a non racial system would mean it would be radically different everywhere. As long as wealth is consolidated, exploitation need occur. Where exploitation occurs, the best way to get people to support their own exploitation is through manufactured markers if difference. “What about Nordic countries and Belgium”. Well, European countries were largely able to posture Liberty Equality Fraternity because the exploitation was exported, and even then there was still brutal class conflict and if course persecuted minorities(Norway has an indigenous population thst was nearly wiped out).
  
  As the threat of class conflict rise, Russia fell to communism, and the fear of Bolshevism spread reactionary forces of capital allied themselves with their own mutant offspring and used all the technologies of domination, ideological, financial and material, to turn their racialized, imperial domination inward. The violence of fascism would not look a freak occurance to someone from the Belgian Congo, or Jim Crow South, or Vietnam or South Africa.
  
  Fascism is an offspring of the global economic system of domination. No place or people is immune. As the parent comment said, they’d find a new outgroup. Capital needs ideological justification for its theft and domination. Describe the American privatized prisons to someone and ask them what nation is being described.
  
  A final note, as Adorno(see username) points out, this is not opposite the forces of Enlightenment and Progressivism. It is embedded in the logic of Enlightenment. Categorization, quantification, implies grester and lesser values. All morality is reduced to market exchange. Tell people in the “backward” Middle Ages that starvation was needed as an explicit threat to keep people working(something argued in 17th cent England with the Poor’s Act and literally echoed today by Neoliberals), and they wouldsay that is the height of barbarity. But human worth is production and consumption, we are in a dog eat dog social world built to consolidate wealth and power. One that was wholly alien to all societies prior to the 15th century. God sorry this got so long. All to say, race is an invented means of differentiation, something else wouldve arisen to replace it had everyone been white.
  
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fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
If it’s not race they’d find something else to hate each other over. In Latin American (and other places) you’ll have people who think they’re better because they’re lighter skinned, even if they’re the same race.

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