The in-groups and out-groups always exist, and will be at war perpetually. It’s naive to think such a division would begin and end at something so superficial a

The in-groups and out-groups always exist, and will be at war perpetually. It’s naive to think such a division would begin and end at something so superficial as skin color; you can go much more specific. Why would the British man go out of his way to identify himself with those bloody red-haired potato-fetishizing Irishmen? Or the pompous Frenchmen who cover their pervasive stench in perfumes and jam lard into anything they can find in some depraved vision of “high couture”? Or the barbarians and savages of the east, who can’t tell the difference between a puff of wind and God? The 12th century African man hardly runs around thinking “we’re all black, so we’re all the same so nothing to fight about” — they just choose a different division and massacre one another on that basis You would only bother with white vs black racism when there’s enough blacks to identify against and vice versa; otherwise you choose different boundaries and compete on that. Religion, country, skin color, geography (eg mountain men vs hicks vs cityfolk); there’s more than enough choices to go around. And hell, there’s something stopping you from applying multiple boundaries simultaneously Your 16th century farming peasant in the corner of England doesn’t see enough Africans or Middle Easterns or Asians to wield race as an effective identity. Your Roman’s could have, but they also had quite the diverse array of colors and folks through varying conquest — race probably played a role in internal conflict (Roman vs roman) but even then religion was clearly the far stronger identifier and a much stronger motivator for their slaughters.