a big surprise

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idoneus1957
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a big surprise

Post by idoneus1957 »

Chairete,
This came as a big surprise to me when I realized it a few months ago, but there was no racism in the classical world.
Think about it. A Greek only cared whether or not you were Greek. If you weren't Greek, he didn't care what color you were. That's chauvinism, but it isn't racism.
If my memory serves me correctly, when Herodotus is talking about the "long-lived Ethiopians," he doesn't even say they are dark skinned, just that they were very tall.
I guess they thought in terms of the "nation," not the "race." They just had not invented the idea of lumping everybody lighter than a certain shade as "white people," and others as "people of color."
And the Romans at their most snobbish never forgot that they were a mixed people.
Idoneus

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Paul Derouda
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Re: a big surprise

Post by Paul Derouda »

I think you're right and wrong at the same time. When we say racism, we often think of something directed against dark-skinned people of African origin. That form simply didn't exist in ancient Greece. While I'm no expert, I think that that form of racism has it's roots in historical developments that began only a few hundred years ago – I think slave trade from Africa to the New World was the most important, but I'm also thinking about colonialism in Africa.

A very important point is that in the whole New World, a slave came to be identified with dark skin – all slaves were black and all blacks where slaves. Black color was something that stamped you as a slave for your whole life. When we take a broader look at the world, people about everywhere have had slaves. Slaves were very often foreigners, won as war booty and sold into slavery. But I think generally slaves in the Greek or Roman world didn't look so different from their owners, even if they were from a different country and perhaps spoke a different language, and if they served their masters well, they might in the end be liberated and gain their freedom and be integrated into their new society, especially if they learnt the language and so on – or at least their children might be, and no one would suspect that they had a slave ancestry. This doesn't mean that I don't think that slavery in the classical world wasn't every bit as cruel as in black slavery in America, but it was different in that in didn't involve a permanent racial caste. And think about Russia: they had a form of slavery into the 1860's just like the U.S. But can you tell by looking at Russians which ones are descended from slaves and which ones not? Look at an American and the answer is obvious (Barack Obama being an obvious exception).

But to say that Greeks didn't have racism is a bit absurd. I think all human beings are prejudiced about those who are different than "us". The fact that they had no scruples about having foreigners as slaves is one thing. And then when we look how they viewed their enemies the Persians for instance is another. I'm sure the list could go on for pages.

But it's true that the Greeks had no negative views about dark-skinned people. Ethiopians (which was basically the word for all dark-skinned peoples of Africa, the original meaning being probably "burnt-face") were for them an exotic but pious people who lived at the edge of the world; they were generally viewed positively and were thought to live in harmony with the gods. In Homer, they dined with the gods, and the we still have a righteous Ethiopian at Acts 8:26-40.

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Paul Derouda
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Re: a big surprise

Post by Paul Derouda »

And a funny thing about Herodotus: he maintains that Ethiopians were not only black, but also that they ejaculated black semen!

Timothée
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Re: a big surprise

Post by Timothée »

We humans have a built-in outlook that earlier the world was a better place. Our parents and grandparents have probably talked about it every now and then, and perhaps we, too, are guilty of it. This is nothing new: Hesiod is one of the early examples of this view in writing, and we have similar assessments expressed in the clay tablets of the ancient Near Eastern.

To think that there was no racism in the Classical Antiquity falls into the same category. Besides: we want it to be true. But think about the notion of βάρβαροι. To say it entails nothing but simply an unintelligible language, different from Greek, is frequently repeated but hardly correct. We unfortunately have it in us to think in terms "we against them" (maybe inherited from clan-based times before settling down), be it very locally (our village vs. the neighbouring one) or (since the globalisation) world-wide. Racism seems always to ensue. Man's incapability of learning from the past is hair-raising.

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