Greentext

@Flax_vert@feddit.uk

That's also speculation on my part, but I do indeed believe racism against black people in the US stems from slavery. Africans were imported in abundance and were the easiest to buy, them doing grunt work all the time made people think they are not good for anything else.

If you look at countries like Russia, where slavery existed, but was aimed at people of same ethnicity, it is somewhat apparent. In literature and folklore of that time peasants are usually depicted as not that clever people, it's just that when serfdom was abolished, populations mixed and there was no sure immediate way to tell who used to be a peasant, this practice mostly died out.

If a black person comes to Russia, they'd be met with your run of the mill xenophobia, they look different, people tend to be wary of weird, they don't speak the language, people tend to be afraid of ones they can't understand, stuff like that. But most people wouldn't outright say they are inferior or stupid.

On the other hand, there are "modern slaves" in Russia, migrants mostly from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan who are occupied with extremely low salary jobs usually involving hard physical labor. Those people are very commonly targeted with racism, even though they speak Russian better and look more like the eastern population of Russia. Current Russian government going ~~a bit~~ of the rails does not help the case at all.

Most black people were brought to the US through slavery and now you have a very distinct marker of somebody who's ancestors with a very high probability were slaves. Washing this out of the society is very hard once it's been established, sadly.

All that said, I do think it's the connection "only good for grunt work -> stupid" that fuels racism, not the other way around.

A slave owner would buy any slave, whoever is the slave would be deemed inferior. It just so happens that buying people from Africa was the path of least resistance for getting slaves in the US.