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Would racism in the USA still exist if humans had automated robots in the 1800s? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

If you look at how the USA has progressed, the south is STILL stuck in certain trends that affect current day society. It's why they're the bible belt, but states like Arizona and California aren't reffered to as "the south".

Geographically it makes no sense. California, Arizona, New Mexico, they're all geographically south, but that's not what that means.

And racism in the south is just so much more amplified than it is in other states. When you think about it, the 1860s are not THAT long ago in terms of societies.

I think we're still being affected by actions from those times. A family experiences hardship. So they raise their kid to not trust those that caused it. And that kid grows up and does the same. Without a break in the chain, it just perpetuates more of the same.

So we're only about 8 generations removed from that time. It's really not that much. And OBVIOUSLY slavery is going to cause racism.

But what if the slaves were left on Africa, and the plantation owners just had automated drones that did all the work?

What would racism today look like?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Yes, for two reasons:

The racism of the 1800s was built on that of the 1700s and the 1600s. The Atlantic slave trade as an institution was almost 250 years old when the civil war happened, so that kind worldview doesn't get built overnight and it doesn't evaporate overnight.
The south resisted industrialization because slave labor was cheaper, already represented a significant investment, and didn't require scrapping and investing a bunch more money to build factories and such. Plus the south doesn't benefit from things like the Great Lakes as a transport network so industrialization was never going to take off there anyway until the transport barrier could be overcome with trains and later trucks. But even with those things, the South is considerably less industrialized than the Midwest. Looking at this map you can see that even today the 'industrial regions' in the South are still almost all along major rivers and near good natural harbors.

So even if robots had been ready for widespread commercial adoption in 1800 they would still have represented a significant investment to transition from a slave-economy, probably wouldn't have achieved widespread adoption, and thus probably wouldn't have displaced many slaves. But even if that wasn't the case the racism that came alongside slavery was already well-established, and as the Jim Crow era showed, once slaves were no longer the backbone of the economy they were relegated to second-class-citizen status and much, much worse. Another 60 years wouldn't have made that big a difference (and don't point to the last 60 years as evidence of what can change in that time, the way racism has changed in the US in that period has largely been a product of technological advancement in TV, internet, etc exposing folks to different people and ideas.)