Quote:
Originally Posted by adidasss
Ok, first of all, slavery in the American south was always inextricably tied to racism. It was based on the notion that black people were inherently inferior to whites and therefore can become property.
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That might have been used by some idiots as a kind of moral pretext to justify it, but at the essence this is not what slavery is about. Slavery is not ideological, it is functional. The real motivation for slavery is not race, it is cheap labour. It just so happened that the cheapest place for American traders to get slaves was West Africa.
More to the point, though, slavery was never considered morally abhorrent in those times. It was a pretty normal, conventional part of the majority of human societies, particularly in many African societies. Of course, the African natives who sold those prisoners into slavery to Europeans must not have found it morally problematic either. It was a pretty normal transaction.
I think negative attitudes towards blacks was largely the
result of slavery, not the motivation for it. American slave traders did not think to themselves "let's get slaves from Africa, since those people are inferior and worth less than us so it's alright". They just did it because it was the most profitable enterprise available to them. It was the social circumstance of black people existing only as slaves in a majority white country that led to a widespread view of them as an inferior race and an underclass.
Another example of widespread slavery of black people is the case of Abyssinian slaves in the Arabian peninsula back one and a half or so thousand years ago. The Arabs didn't keep them as slaves because they were black. It was merely easy to buy slaves from East Africa.