He is now systematically embarked on a program of replacing the governing bodies of all state universities with pro-business, Fundamentalist Christian, conservative and corporate types, culture warriors, and getting rid of all the professional educators and academic weenies. The purpose of a university degree, apparently, is no longer woke, but work.

We’re going back to the days of the Johns Committee. (Look it up).

But Christianity and Islam taught all humans had rights and dignity in the eyes of god, and it was wrong to treat them as property. In order to employ other humans as beasts of burden, or factory machines on an industrial scale, and still profess Christian values it was necessary to dehumanize them. They had to be seen as deserving slavery because they weren’t real people. And race was a way of easily visualizing and identifying suitable candidates. In the writings of antiquity, you rarely hear the race of a person mentioned, it simply didn’t matter; it was ethnic, class, tribal and family connections that were important. If a Roman had a Greek slave, he didn’t think all Greeks deserved to be slaves, or that Romans shouldn’t be enslaved at all.

The slave markets of the ancient world were fully integrated, all races, nations and religions contributed to them. It was religion that championed individual virtue and sin that made them segregated by race. Its OK to enslave blacks, just look at them. You can SEE they are slaves. They deserve it. Its in their blood.

What I still can’t figure out is how slavery changed in the New World. The Spanish civilization of Latin America employed slaves just as brutally as the Anglos in the North, but when it was finally outlawed those societies accepted it. There was still social racism, but not the sort of malice and hatred shown to the Negro in North America. Why this should be is not clear.

I found the Expanse post you made interesting when he described race in that show. Race had evolved into earthers, martians and belters, regardless of traditional racial descriptions. Interesting point on how Americans see race: Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, etc are seen as the asian/oriental race, but they see themselves as different races. Anyone white is the white race, but in Europe many view southern and eastern europeans as diffent races than northern europeans. Middle Eastern people are looked at as the same but Arabs and Persians feel very differently. Blacks in Africa have deep and extreme hostility toward people from different tribal backgrounds. Not really sure how Latin Americans view one another overall, but to most Americans they are all the same south of the Rio Grande. I think these simplistic racial categories are a combination of America’s melting pot background and basic ignorance of the rest of the world.

I’m of Cuban heritage (all four of my grandparents were from the old country) and I have kept the culture and language of that nation. I also consider myself a political Liberal, as how that term is understood in contemporary American usage. But to be reminded by some gringo do-gooder how I should be referring to myself is really patronizing and insulting.

I’m not slamming you personally, Buck; what you say is certainly correct–technically. But this type of linguistic bullying does no one any good, and does nothing to eliminate bias and prejudice. It just makes these limousine liberals feel better about themselves at my expense, without actually doing anything worthwhile for marginalized communities. In a way, it is itself nothing but a subtle form of racism.