[protomyth]

> Americans view everything in life through the race and skin color lens. It's becoming really exhausting and frustrating to deal with.

As a popular TV program put it, it's America's original sin. Also, it factors into targeted politics that is in vogue. Separate everyone into groups and target them with specific (and sometimes conflicting) messages. It works, so I wouldn't expect a change.

[_yosefk]

Isn't it everyone's original sin? Which nation did not conquer the land it occupies today from some other nation? Which nation did not have the institution of slavery?

[jessaustin]

Forcibly occupying land that is occupied by others is not necessarily driven by racism. Often it is hunger, or something else. Slavery in many locations was not something done to other races, but to other closely-related tribes, long enough ago that no one remembers the difference between those tribes.

USA is somewhat unique in that we enslaved people who were easily distinguishable from the rest of us, and also in that after slavery was ended we maintained a system of laws and cultural norms that kept the former slaves and their descendants separate from and disadvantaged to other citizens. That is our sin. It functions so that racist institutions and the habit of racism reinforce each other, and even pull other races such as Native Americans into the Other category. That didn't happen in Mexico or Brazil or many other places in which multiple races had had a problematic history but then learned to coexist, if not on an equal footing then also not on a so aggressively unequal one.

[jrochkind1]

I don't think the US (or it's colonial forebears) forcibly occupying the land occupied by others, or importing others as enslaved laborers -- was _driven_ by racism either, especially at it's origin. It was driven by economic profit, same as usual. Europeans didn't conquer the Americas because they hated Native Americans, they did it because they wanted the land and it's resources. They didn't import slaves, originally, because they hated Africans, they did it because they wanted free labor.

But the pertinent thing about America is how the society was structured based on racism to _manage_ the economic exploitation. It was convenient to those on top to color-code the socio-economic structure. And this was done at an early stage in European settler colonial society in North America (By the 1600s it was fairly solidified).

This is what makes racism the 'original sin' of the U.S.

And it is definitely not at all a constant in historical examples of nations or kingdoms conquering land. There are plenty of examples, especially pre-modern, of the conquered people being fully or mostly integrated into the conquering society on the same basis as the already existing population of the conquererors. Now, especially in pre-modern times, 'the same basis' could mean as impoverished and disenfranchised peasants -- but the same as the impoverished and disenfranchised peasants of the conquering kingdom, state, or nation. Or in other cases, incorporated into an existing society that is somewhat more complex and with opportunities for advancement

(How the Ottoman Empire treated it's conquered populations is super interesting, and certainly not always great, but _very different_ from how we assume this thing works in modern times. The Ottoman Empire was sort of a pre-modern socio-political structure that hung on into the beginnings of modernism).

There has always been conquering in human history, and it's often been brutal. Even in the pre-Columbian Americas. (Although at the same time it's not been _universal_, there are more and less brutal, and more and less expansionist, societies in human history. )

But the very idea of 'race' is a modern phenomenon, as is structuring a stratified society based on race. (And the idea of race developed in the main during a process of structuring societies based on racial stratification, in a way that hadn't genererally existed before).

[jessaustin]

Yes I agree with all of this.

Your reference to the integration of the conquered reminds me of James C. Scott's studies of the states of Southeast Asia. As he explains it, the limiting factor on the wealth of kings was the number of subjects they had working the land. So when they went to war, it was primarily to capture more people they could enserf. There was actually a regular intergenerational cycle. Grandparents could have been (the equivalent of) serfs, some of their grandchildren might have had some sort of sub-chief of a sub-village position, others might have been conscripted to fight a war to round up more farm labor, while others yet might have run off to the hills to stay out of reach of the state.

[jrochkind1]

I love James C. Scott's writings too. :)

I am currently going through _Seeing Like a State_, going through it pretty slowly because nearly every page is so thought-provoking.

[protomyth]

The US wrote slavery into its constitution and immediately started the attacks on the Native Americans.