I sometimes wonder whether this is where the whole “pale skin is better” trope came from - the main difference slaves of African origin would have in the average Roman or Greek marketplace would be *visibility* - they were visibly different (usually taller, certainly darker, some of them a lot thinner etc) and thus noticeable. When the only dark-skinned people to be seen are ones who were enslaved (generally as prisoners of war, or through tribal or cross-cultural raiding), it’s hard to think of them any other way. There needn’t have been very many of them - maybe one slave in a thousand… but when you have one noticeably distinct person in a group of one thousand, the other nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine all sort of fade into the background.

So the image of the black slave wriggled its way into the European consciousness (first through the Greek expansion, then the post-Alexandrian Greek empires, then the Romans, and finally through the Christian expansion) and got transported all around the world. It’s only in the last hundred years or so that we’ve started to think about what this means, and where it came from. It’s only in the last two hundred years or so we’ve actually started to critique the notion of slavery per se - what does slavery mean, can it ever be moral, can it ever be ethical - that sort of thing. We probably still have a long way to go.

While tantalizing to imagine that racism as we know it has always existed, your theory has been pretty well disproven by scholars. Read early modern English texts and you will notice that, while zenophobia was rampant (and could look to our eyes like racism), class mitigated this prejudice (see Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko). To the Greeks, all non-Greek speaking peoples were barbarians and therefore legal to enslave. The Romans pretty much made all non-noble conquered peoples slaves of one sort or other. Slavery was ubiquitous within Africa even, with lighter-skinned Ethiopians enslaving darker-skinned Africans. Serfs are slaves of another sort. Racism is not what drives slavery, it just became a powerful ideological tool to justify slavery from the 17th century onward.

Dan, that’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. Slaves and indentured servants built Ford, GM, Westinghouse, GE, Boeing, Eastman-Kodak, Xerox, Polariod…?

Considering that none of these companies was founded until after America’s economy was already well established, your question is, as they say, not even wrong.

And citing George Westinghouse as someone who didn’t benefit from undervalued labor is surely grounds for some kind of international award for profound historical ignorance. He made his name engineering railroad technology, for fuck’s sake.

I sometimes wonder whether this is where the whole “pale skin is better” trope came from - the main difference slaves of African origin would have in the average Roman or Greek marketplace would be *visibility* - they were visibly different (usually taller, certainly darker, some of them a lot thinner etc) and thus noticeable. When the only dark-skinned people to be seen are ones who were enslaved (generally as prisoners of war, or through tribal or cross-cultural raiding), it’s hard to think of them any other way. There needn’t have been very many of them - maybe one slave in a thousand… but when you have one noticeably distinct person in a group of one thousand, the other nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine all sort of fade into the background.

So the image of the black slave wriggled its way into the European consciousness (first through the Greek expansion, then the post-Alexandrian Greek empires, then the Romans, and finally through the Christian expansion) and got transported all around the world. It’s only in the last hundred years or so that we’ve started to think about what this means, and where it came from. It’s only in the last two hundred years or so we’ve actually started to critique the notion of slavery per se - what does slavery mean, can it ever be moral, can it ever be ethical - that sort of thing. We probably still have a long way to go.

Dan, that’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. Slaves and indentured servants built Ford, GM, Westinghouse, GE, Boeing, Eastman-Kodak, Xerox, Polariod…? What the fuck are you injecting?

JimB, thanks for once again demonstrating my point about you: you are completely and utterly ignorant of American history, and you’re proud of it. As far as you’re concerned, the United States magically appeared in 1886 when George Westinghouse founded his company.

Aren’t you even a little embarrassed at your complete lack of knowledge of the history of your own country? How far does your ignorance go? Can you name the three branches of government? Do you know how many amendments make up the Bill of Rights? Can you name two people who signed the Declaration of Independence? Do you know when the United States entered World War I? Anything?

Here is a list of all “murder” news 110,000 of them. Guess what the racial balance is? enjoy

http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&hl=en&ned=us&q=murder&btnG=Search+News

also, try not to lie ‘mkay.

Slave labor also literally built the infrastructure of most American cities which have urban centers predating the Civil War and/or the decline of slave labor in the north. Including Washington DC, by the way. Before black Civil Rights activists marched on the Mall in Washington, their predecessors BUILT said Mall.

btw, Polaroid, Zenit are nothing but brand owned by chinese. Westhinghouse is owned by Japanese (Toshiba)

Xerox is middling company with $13B market cap. Canon inc. market cap is about 5 times, and Sony is 3 times bigger. Samsung, the current diversified electronic giant conglomerate is at $103B, almost 10 times bigger.

The biggest car maker in the world is Toyota. Chrysler is gone (almost) The fastest growing car company in the world is Hyundai’s China’s division, a sino-korean company.

America’s brand name is Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, Google, Facebook, Affymetrix, … They have bigger influence and size than anything ever existed before. Bigger than all those outmoded basic manufacturing and service company.

Your world view is from the 60’s. You are a RELIC!

Get with it or we should pass a law banning you from voting.