>>51105736You fail to understand just how massive slavery was towards our understanding of race, racism and white supremacy.
In the past I've mentioned how ancient societies didn't have a concept of race. The Greeks understood people looked different, and attributed this to climate, but they didn't have a concept of race. In Ancient Greece you had culture and concepts like Greekness that were tied to the way you behaved, your social actions and the language you spoke. It was tied to culture rather than apperance. The way you drank your wine, the language you spoke, carrying weapons in open spaces, etc were factors that determined your Greekness, not your physical apperance. Indeed the kings of Makedon, the Argeards, had to constantly fight over their perceived Greekness with their Greek neighbors to the South, the people of Western Greece like the Aitolians who were politically formed up in at ethne political structure instead of the polis and who carried weapons in public were considered semi-barbarians by Greek writers such as Thukydides because of their political structure and cultural practices. Indeed, there was no racial component to ancient slavery. Anyone could be a slave whether they be Thrakian or Athenian.
But the transatlantic slave trade developed a racial component tied to physical apperance. To put it short people viewed black people as inferior because many of them were slaves, they tied slave, thus inferior, status with one's physical apperance and concepts such as whiteness and blackness arose from these physical descriptions.
Indeed while in the past some people's whiteness might have been questioned, like South Europeans in the US, they at least had a chance to be white, a black person would never have that opportunity to be included into the white identity.
