Racism is.......

[Carfax83]

If you crunch the numbers down only 0.5% of the white population in America owned slaves in the 1800's. That small percent owned thousands of slaves but still, 99.5% of white americans had nothing to do with slavery other than dying to protect that institution when the Civil war came around [or dying to remove it]..And those who did fight and die to protect slavery were the dirt poor redneck whites who were lucky to own a house let alone own a slave. State's rights was the lie to get the poor southern whites to fight without knowing it was another word to fight in the name of slavery.

The sources I've read indicate that there were approximately 350,000 slave owners, as per the 1850 Census..

However, when you consider the fact that slaves were inherited and remained property of the slaveholder's family after his death, then that number can easily be quintupled or sextupled...

And then factor in the amount of indirect beneficiaries, people who's livelihood or income revolved around slavery such as slave overseers, lawyers, merchants etcetera, the number is increased even more..

All of this is irrelevant though, because as Woolfe and SheHateMe said, the overall culture at the time was permissive, and supportive towards slavery.

Slavery cannot exist in a culture that condemns it (at least not openly), which is why the War eventually occurred..

 

[Carfax83]

It sounds wrong today to say it, but in the 1800s and before it the idea of having a black slave was perfectly fine...It was the British and the Americans [northern part atleast] who changed things and said slavery was bad btw...The Arabs were content to keep their slaves, it took English ships and threats of attack to make THEM stop.

I agree with this. Whilst the great European powers were responsible for beginning the largest slave trade ever in human history, they were also responsible for stopping it, and opposing slavery in general all over the World.

The British in particular eventually spear headed the anti-slavery movement both politically and militarily, despite the fact that the British Empire had been the largest importer of slaves for decades..

 

[Carfax83]

If we are talking about racial, or rather, cultural "purity", only two groups of people in the world are said to have maintained this endogamy - Hindu Brahmins and some Ashkenazi Jews. Hindu Brahmins are able to trace their lineage back through several millenia due to the strict adherence to endogamy and self-discipline. Unfortunately (or fortunately for the untouchables), this practice is slowly being eroded due to varNa-samkarA (inter-caste marriage).

What about the Amish?

Racial "purity" is superficial and frankly pointless - the real question to ask is whether race and culture and interlinked. That, of course, is a discussion for another thread.

I touched on this earlier in the thread. In my opinion, culture and race are completely distinct entities. Race itself is a vague concept rooted in morphological differences between humans, whilst culture is all psychological..

A black child raised by a French family will gain the cultural and behavioral characteristics normally associated with French people...

As for race, there can be greater differences within the so called racial groups as well. For instance, Ghanaians have different physical characteristics than say Ethiopians, yet they are both considered black..

 

[sandorski]

History, it matters.