this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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Rough Roman Memes
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Which thing are you thinking of with the inventing racism? You can find claims to the contrary, but usually it's thought skin colour wasn't what mattered, and they certainly weren't first with more general bigotry.
I'm being slightly facetious about the reasons they fucked Alaric over to their immense regret. If you think there wasn't some proto-racism going on there, maybe ask yourselves why modern-type racists have obsessed over it for five hundred years.
Further, racism isn't just about skin color, and it's just not honest to pretend otherwise.
See the English attitudes towards basically everyone but the French and Frisians for further details. Or American attitudes towards anyone not English bred.
I did mention other kinds of bigotry there. If you dislike someone because their food is funny and they have a dumb accent that counts, and is probably as old as humanity.
When ancient writers thought about the physical and supposed mental differences between people groups, they tended to gravitate towards the supposed effect of climate, rather than "they're a heritably different (sub)species", which is I think the central idea of raceism.
Yes yes it's not racism unless it's from the Kent region of England, etc. It's just broadly applying stereotypes to large groups of "them" with terms modern scholars almost always translate as "race" because it's the closest modern concept.
Further, this belief system definitely didn't contribute to the collapse of the Empire as the rulers divided historical classes of citizens into sub-classes with less rights and privileges. Definitely nothing familiar about that that you could joke about the invention of racism with.
I don't think there's an actual disagreement here, but I will object to your tone. I don't think I did anything to deserve it.