Socially acceptable racism

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But why was it forbidden at all?

One drop rule.

And where did this come from? Such laws and rules are not arbitrarily imposed by higher power, they reflect beliefs of the lawmakers.
What beliefs led to intermarriage ban and one drop rule?

His story. Basic amerikkkan His Story 101.

But how far does one go back in time? Does ancestors who died hundreds of years ago benefiting from other types of abuse count too? How about the crusades? Why can't we demand payments from the Germans for WW1 and 2?

When you extrapolate that reasoning it truly never ends.

Had to google what the one drop rule was - never heard of that.

Umm. racism? Blacks were viewed as less than human - and still are by some today. How is it difficult to comprehend that white supremacists, who believe white people are supreme to all others, would have beliefs that led to bans on marrying black people?

There's 400 years of garbage to sum up.. but basically, one group viewed the other as lesser by every metric and convinced people they weren't to mix, that it was wrong. Not only marriage and babies, but in school or work or a shop or riding on a bus - in every way. Blacks were considered subhuman slaves for free labour and treated far worse than horses.

Make sense?

Hell, even the US Constitution defined blacks as being 3/5ths of a person. The earliest lawmakers in America put it in writing that they considered black people only 60% the being that white people are. And that document was written less than 400 years ago and has governed their country ever since. JUST GOOGLED RN - what they actually wrote up was to count slaves as 3/5ths of a person towards a state's total population so that slave owning Southern states couldn't use their full slave population to justify more members in governement and have more power. BUT people like me who have never looked that up only know the 3/5ths part. Blacks were slaves and considered lesser, to this day blacks are viewed as lesser - it's been 400 years of it in North America, and a lot longer world wide, and a difficult social construct to change - especially when there are very large groups of Americans fighting tooth and nail and preserve their white privilege, have white supremacist views, and racist negative views of non whites etc etc.

Up until the 1960s, in some states, a person was considered black if that person had one great-great (sometimes even great-great-great) grandparent who was black.

These folks were subject to the same civil disabilities as full-blooded black folks.

Honestly? From my cultural standpoint, it does not make sense.
Hostility, hate, prejudice, exploitation - yeah, these are familiar evils. But this systematic dehumanization - the closest thing to it in this region happened 80 years ago, lasted just a few years and ended in complete moral defeat, becoming a synonym to evil.

I doubt that there was much intermarriage between Gentile Poles and Polish Jews.

But be that as it may...

But thats true that in the Latin and Caribean there was more racial mixing than in Anglo North America. And also "mixed race" was recognized as a thing in and of itself in the Caribbean and Latin America. In the US its just Black and White, there is no concept of "Mulatto". Roy Campanella had an Italian dad, and a Black American mom, so he was fifty-fifty (Like Barrack Obama), but he was forced to play in the Negro Leagues until Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in pro baseball in 1947, and was only then allowed into the then newly integrated major leagues.

In say, the Dominican Republic, both Obama and Campanella would be classified as "Mulatto", and neither would thought of as "Black".

The reasons are many. Mexico was colonized by Cortez and the Conquistadors (all male armies) who had no choice but to marry in the local Indian population- resulting in the largely Mestizo (mixed European Amerind) make up of modern Mexicans. While the founders of Anglo America, the Pilgrims and the Jamestown setters, consisted of whole families coming over. Not sure why slave owners in Brazil interrmarried with the slave race more often the American slave owners did. Interesting question.

Even in French ruled New Orleans they had the Latin American attitude of mixed raced being a category of its own. Octoroons and quadroons had their own strata in the racial caste system above pure Blacks but under pure Whites. But that all changed when New Orleans was ceded to the USA. Then all of the mixed race folks lost their status and became "just plain old n****rs".

One mindbending theory, that I lean toward, is ironic. That American style racism is actually a tragic byproduct of American democracy. It was in the Anglo USA where the idea of democracy took hold.

In the former Iberian colonies they had no concept that "All Men are Created Equal", thus they had no need construct a counter ideology that some "men" are subhuman (to justify unequal treatment and political disenfranchisement). Thus they did not need to create the more toxic form of racism that the US created.

Alas, there was a large economic component to slavery in the US and other areas.

Thomas Jefferson depended on his slaves to forestall his bankruptcy. He was tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

Right, but in North America ~100,000,000 people were wiped out in a nearly complete genocide and no one talks about it. It's not taught as evil - or even taught that it happened and the descendants who remain are still here watching colonizers destroy their ancestral lands. People here have MOSTLY refused to accept these behaviours are bad and just carry on with racism, possibly justifying modern racism as being superior to genocide or enslavement so what do people have to complain about? kind of mentality.

The holocaust is taught as bad. But they don't really talk about North American crimes against humanity. They just sweep that all under the rug for the most part.

As an American, I didn't grasp racism either. Why would I want to judge someone by the color of their skin or blame their actions on their skin color? That is so stupid.

Why would I want to treat someone different because of their skin color?

What is wrong with people having kids with other people who have a different skin color?

What's wrong with adopting a kid that is a different skin color than yours?

None of this made zero sense and I couldn't see the problem in it and even I tried asking my mom and she said it didn't make sense because it's stupid and compared it to blue eyes and blonde hair because that is how stupid racism is.

I have tried to understand what causes racism, why are people racist. I could never get an answer because no one was ever interested in understanding why people are racist. I think only way to understand racism is to talk to those who are actually racist and you get their perspective and you start to understand that racism is a different mindset they have and this is like a mental illness. You see how skewed their perspective is and how they twist facts and statistics and you might think these people are so doomed, they are their own victim and their own worst enemy. You also see that they don't see themselves as racist so hence "white fragility."

Why "white fragility" and "white privilege" when anyone can be racist?

Because racism holds more power than just being prejudice. White people have always held more power so hence the big focus is on white people being racist. Put in mind that Peggy Mcintosh and Robin DeAngelo are from the US where black people have been oppressed and where Native Americans had their lands taken from them, they were all killed in groups, given a small piece of land for them to live on. So hence why the big focus is on white people. Of course anyone can be prejudice and racism happens in other countries as well and of course white people can be oppressed in countries where they are the minority but that does not erase US history and make it invalid.

I don't think any of us can ever meet a racist who will say "I am a racist."

It's a simple darwinian malthusian reaction nearly/probably all races/cultures/peoples are guilty of to some/various extents. Insider/outsider group dynamics. Evolutionary adaption and biological drives shaping human social heirachies. Its not really hard to grasp. It's millions of years of killer apes subduing their environment. Its human patriarchal dominance systems. Males controlling their genetic lineage. His story.

If you can take you mind out of you own particular reality tunnel framework for a minute, you will realise the universe is bigger and more complex than your own prefabricated mental map you were imprinted with by random chance and temporal operant conditions.

Not much but happened - required baptism. Many more informal unions. Illegitimate children were often enough raised and integrated into the community, my aunt's genealogical research shows such stories in my own bloodline.


A similar phenomenon happened in 16th century Poland. It had a very curious political system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Liberty with similar concepts of liberty and equality among the privileged class and ruthless exploitation of serfs.
However, after this system ceased to exist, the privileged and non-privileged classes mixed into a now near-homogenous society.

I had an online friend tell me that if racism didn't exist, the human race would go extinct. I thought that was the lamest excuse ever to justify racism. Seriously.

I don't know about going extinct. I don't know what the reasoning is behind that. Why they'd come to that conclusion.

But the human species most likely exists today as the dominant species because of racism. Racism against our slower and more muscular counterparts, the neanderthal. Who were assimilated genetically and wiped out as a distinct phenotype.