Racism was created as an attempt to justify the European conquests and slavery. As I understand it, in ancient times people didn’t think of groups of people as “races” any more than most people these days regard people with green, brown, or blue eyes as seperate races ( even though that’s just as valid as the standard definition of race ).
It remains due to cultural inertia and to keep justifying the remaining injustices/damage caused by the old conquests/enslavements/massacres. Also, because defining such catagories makes them “real”, in a sense; if green eyed people were treated like blacks, pretty soon necessity and shared experience would make them into a seperate group.
Der Trihs, if you are saying that “ancient” people lived in societies devoid of prejudice, I think you are sadly mistaken. Probably not the same prejudices that we have today, but I think distinctions were made between different groups of people.
But going back to the OP, I think everyone has instinctive prejudices. It’s a matter of how much we believe them to be true and allow them to affect our decisions and attitudes.
Maybe the arbitrary designations of today are equally irrational as a Tang dynasty Chinese person’s belief that any non-Chinese person is inherently inferior, but they’re there and you cannot avoid them. Pretending otherwise would be just silly.
Like many people have said, I think it’s human instinct to distinguish between “us” and “them”.
Exactly. “Not the same prejudices that we have today”, including racism. Without the concept of race, nobody is going to be racist. Hating everyone outside of your clan/tribe/whatever is bigoted, it’s xenophobic, but it’s not racist. It’s not racist until if and when people get around to defining race in the first place.
And if nothing else, how often did people in most cultures even have contact with people of other races ? Quite a few cultures had no idea they even existed; nasty as they were, I doubt the ancient Aztecs were racist - at least not until they encountered Europeans, and had somebody to be racist towards, and exposure to the idea of race.
The way I see it, since they didn’t have varied ‘races’, they formed their own arbitrary distinctions (castes, members of other villages, etc) since somebody had to be ‘them’.
Since race is the most prevalent construct today and no one is immune to prejudice, I think we can say that everyone is at least a lil bit racist (IMHO, of course).