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> Another anachronism in the article: the West never practiced "racism" in the modern sense until the sixteenth century at the earliest. The West in antiquity

> Another anachronism in the article: the West never practiced "racism" in the modern sense until the sixteenth century at the earliest. The West in antiquity may not have practiced racism in terms of overt discrimination against people based on the color of their skin. However, many influential thinkers hold that othering a non-Western person based on his skin color or origin is a form of racism, and there are a number of attestations of sub-Saharan Africans in Roman and Greek literature where the author or his society is obviously othering them.

scarmig 6y ago
That's projecting contemporary social structures onto a very different time and place. It makes as much sense as saying the Han were white and the Xiongnu were black. "Whiteness" and "blackness" are social constructs that didn't even exist until a millenium after the fall of the Roman Empire. Sure, the Romans discriminated against and had stereotypes they held about different foreigners. But they didn't think of themselves as any of white or European or Western; the demarcation was Roman and non-Roman. They would have felt a much closer affinity with someone from Alexandria or Carthage than they would have with some random tribesman in Belgium, who would have just as many cultural and physical stereotypes about him as a Nubian from Kush.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  The sources are clear that the Romans and Greeks considered sub-Saharan Africans "exotic" because the latter had black skin, and prostitutes of sub-Saharan African origin were sometimes sought out by Romans and ascribed certain qualities due to their dark skin. It has been suggested that such othering is an act of oppression regardless of what historical era it occurred in. That is, the Romans did not need to have our contemporary understanding of race in order to engage in racism towards black Africans.

scarmig 6y ago

That's projecting contemporary social structures onto a very different time and place. It makes as much sense as saying the Han were white and the Xiongnu were black. "Whiteness" and "blackness" are social constructs that didn't even exist until a millenium after the fall of the Roman Empire. Sure, the Romans discriminated against and had stereotypes they held about different foreigners. But they didn't think of themselves as any of white or European or Western; the demarcation was Roman and non-Roman. They would have felt a much closer affinity with someone from Alexandria or Carthage than they would have with some random tribesman in Belgium, who would have just as many cultural and physical stereotypes about him as a Nubian from Kush.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
The sources are clear that the Romans and Greeks considered sub-Saharan Africans "exotic" because the latter had black skin, and prostitutes of sub-Saharan African origin were sometimes sought out by Romans and ascribed certain qualities due to their dark skin. It has been suggested that such othering is an act of oppression regardless of what historical era it occurred in. That is, the Romans did not need to have our contemporary understanding of race in order to engage in racism towards black Africans.