Whether it arises only from slavery is a separate question. Which also seems false, as there are many counterexamples to this. Americans today, for example, are routinely racists against asians of all sorts, against Middle Easterners, against hispanics, and on and on. We never had any Middle Eastern slave population, though. So the theory that is has to be rooted in slavery appears misguided.
I never said that it exclusively arose from slavery. I said that it arose from unequal contact, when two groups with a distinct appearance come into close contact and one group dominates the other because of whatever reason the groups tend to end up developing racism towards eachother.
Americans have historically dominated Asians (Phillipines and Vietnam), Hispanics (Mexico and Latin America in general) and are presently dominating Middle Easterners (Iraq, Afghanistan). Americans however are most racist against blacks historically speaking (and probably at present) because slavery is a particularly extreme example of the general sense of domination.
I of course agree that slavery is ONE way to get a lot of racism broiling! But the evidence suggests that this is definitely not the only way. Most of the other types of racism described above are much more generically rooted in in-group out-group issues like "THEY are taking OUR jobs" or "THEY are using OUR tax dollars" or "THEY are squatting on OUR land that we just bought" etc. etc.
They really are not. People in my country (Britain) raise much the same kind of objections to Polish people who are white as to middle-easterners or black people.
A lot of that is based upon competitives pressures that are part of Capitalist society (competition for jobs particularly) and not actually part of Dwarf Fortress. What is going on there is that the existing elites are being accused of betraying the in-group in order to unduly facilate the rights of the out-group, regardless of the race of the outgroup.
Where it gets complicated is that people who are already racist object rather strongly to those they consider inferior migrating as they will cause crime/corrupt the gene-pool. They often manage to pass off their racial issues as a more generic in-group/out-group question.
ALL these types of things would apply just as much to the ancient and medieval world as today. Pretty much as soon as you have an economy, all of the above kick into gear. So although I would expect paleolithic and mesolithic people to not be very racists (due to having less conception of ownership or property or homeland), from neolithic onward, the reasons to be racists multiply dramatically.
(Although there's also plenty of evidence of racism in paleolithic times anyway. Between Neanderthals and early homo sapiens, for instance, mixing seems to be very limited despite spatial proximity)
You seem to be confusing Racism with Nationalism.
ANYWAY, unless you have a bunch of hard data about then versus now to quantitatively compare, what matters as far as I can see is "yes, there was definitely racism in medieval times. How much compared to now? None of us really know." Which means it's pretty much valid to implement for gameplay any amount of racism -- and we should just use as much as is fun for the game.
And I think racism would be quite fun, because it increases the depth of the game, adds extra challenges to the social scene, and provides significant gameplay depth to the hybrid idea, beyond just "mixing and matching doll body parts" that it would be otherwise.
The hard data is the number of references you can find as to racist ideas in literature and so on during the periods. There is only one instance of racism in the medieval era that I am aware of and that is not in Europe but in Tunisia. Now that is rather easily explained as the result of North Africa having essentially invented the infamous slave trade that the Europeans would later latch onto to provide labour for their American colonies. So yes the Tunisians were ahead of the curve by a few centuries but none of this proves anything in general.
One does not have to prove a negative. I do not have to prove that racism did not exist to any notable degree in medieval times, you have to prove that it did.
It is not fun to have racism automaticaly exist. It it not fun to have obnoxious racist doctrine about the inherant inability of races to live together turned into a game. It is particularly not fun if we do not have any choice about the matter because the other races just turn up.
Nobody has yet established that this claim is true. Putting it in the form of a leading question that assumes it is true does not make it so. Note that "violent clashes" is not the same thing as "being racist." You can potentially be quite racist without every clashing with anybody of another race. For instance, if people don't move around much due to lack of modern transportation...
It is pretty much clearly established. If it were true that homogeny caused racism then in the medieval ages monks should have been sitting in their cells writing vast racist diatribes. While people in the south of America on account of being a mixed society with plenty of black people around should have in a generation all turned into steller anti-racists by now having been so many centuries since slavery was abolished (we both agree that slavery causes racism).
What we see is that racism increases as the European powers due to their improving naval technology come into more contact
on an uneven basis with other basis, as slaves or imperial 'subjects'. The relative decline of racism corresponds with reducing amounts of uneven contact between races as a result of the end of overt European imperialism.
Contact on an even basis does not cause racism and actually reduces it. However racists always try to ensure that all contact with other races is on an uneven basis, so they make sure to 'segregate' the races while ensuring that their race holds all the top jobs and so will have plenty of contact on an uneven basis with them.
This is correct. And a goblin-dwarf hybrid carries a pretty distinct and obvious and legitimate MEANING that "this dude obviously comes from somewhere with goblins, or his immediate kin do. That makes him more potentially dangerous than a dwarf, because we know goblins are dangerous and we don't trust them."
This meaning persists even if you already have several trusted goblin-dwarf hybrids in town. Those ones may have earned your trust with time by now, but the new one can still be carrying fresh dangerous ideas from his possibly-goblin exposure, and has not yet proven otherwise.
You would be slightly less wary of them than if it were the first hybrid, but only along a sliding scale. Only a community of everybody being hybrids would hit the minimum level of racism against a new hybrid of that type coming into town.
By all means, the longer somebody stays in town without causing trouble, their individual racist treatment should lower. Absolutely.
It is difficult to gage what is really going on here. Is it really that they are racially goblins or is it that they happen to come from the
The Cruelties of Glazing or somesuch goblin civilization.
The question is important because we are assuming that the dwarf civilization of say
The New Earth does not get on well with The Cruelties of Glazing. If someone turns up the dwarf fortress that is a goblin-dwarf hybrid is the problem going to be.
Yikes! That person is half-goblin and goblins are evil.
OR
Yikes! That person is a Cruel Glazer and they are evil.
In the latter case one could use the former fact to determine the latter. Or you could equally use other clues, so the race is only relavant if you actively going about pretending to be a New Earther as a Cruel Glazer. Unless we add spying into the game, people's ability to determine in-group/out-group based upon race is not really relevent since the question is nice and binery. Either you are a Cruel Glazer or a New Earther.
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Topic: Hybridisation: Mixing races. (Read 11745 times)