Pants-of-dog wrote:If you read history, you will see that racism was (and is) very necessary to settler colonialism in the Americas, and things like the residential school system and the transatlantic slave trade clearly indicate that white people convinced themselves of their superiority.
The base assumption is that Indigenous and Black people need to be educated as Europeans in order to rise up to the level of Europeans, which indicates a sense of innate superiority to begin with.
You guys should actually read some of the stuff you pretend to read, because your takes on history are always just unsophisticated and in fact just silly.
You are talking about people and an era which was frankly far more intelligent and enlightened than the current day; they had to be; fools did not live long.
One could easily argue, for example, that the north was far more 'racist' than the south. Because their normal attitude was that they simply do not want black people around, not even as slaves.
And in fact one of their concerns about slavery was not that it was immoral...but rather that they feared a slave uprising...especially after Haiti happened. Part of why southern men were less concerned was simply because they were more comfortable with violence and confident in their martial discipline than the northern eggheads-i mean roundheads..
But in general, really, you might notice if you read more history that nobody was as hysterical as you are about race. The people you like to label as 'white supremacists' generally never even gave the matter much thought. Awareness of race was a thing that largely was a product of Darwin and the widespread acceptance of evolutionary biology...which took quite a long time because both Christians and communists were deeply resistant to it for ideological reasons.
In fact, Voltaire, who was probably the most censored philosopher prior to ww2 and could be the first of the 'new athiests' like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, semi jokingly remarked that if you believe that all humans were created by God, then that would have to include sub saharan africans. Which he felt was ridiculous to consider.
But yeah...the whole narrative and framing you guys construct about how the 'white man' used 'race' to oppress people...is just ignorant and kinda stupid. We used hard power to oppress people...and we never really gave a damn what people 'believed' about it lol. That just wasn't important. In fact the connection between ideology and power has always been rather vague and at best indirect. The real history of power has always been driven by technology, which I personally believe the white man was particularly suited for biologically.