alternatehistory.com

Hi everyone. I know that race and racism in alternate timelines is a difficult topic to discuss, but I think it's one that's worth exploring, and I think this board is mature enough to handle it. So, I was reading over this Wikipedia page that gives a brief overview on how concepts of race used in the western world have changed from the 1500s to today. While it seems that racism, in the sense of discriminating against other cultures, has been around since prehistory, scientific racism (or, more accurately, "scientific") is a much more recent invention which grew out of European colonialism starting in the 1500s. Over the next few centuries, the European elite gradually began to frame race in pseudo-scientific terms rather than religious or cultural terms. This is especially true in the countries of the Americas, particularly the United States, where a person's physical appearance is seen as the most important criterion for membership in a particular race, while religion and language play a lesser role. Although support for scientific racism has thankfully declined in academia since World War II, it sadly remains quite popular among the general population, at least in the US.

Now, here is where the alternate history part comes in. While scientific racism is a morally deplorable concept, I find it quite interesting from an alternate history perspective. It's important to remind ourselves that the racial categories we often take for granted today - Black, East Asian, White, etc. - are on some level arbitrary and thus far from inevitable. Since these distinctions are the product of the political agendas of western Europeans, it seems safe to assume that in alternate timelines with a different distribution of power between parts of the world would develop different racial categories. We can hope that in some timelines, scientific racism never caught on at all, but in timelines where it did, there are nearly infinite different ways that the anthropologists and politicians of these worlds could choose to carve up the human race into artificial categories in order to advance their own agendas. So, my question to you all is this: If some region of the world other than western Europe had been dominant during the early modern era, what kind of race theories might develop out of this region? The more absurd, the better.

As a final word, I just want to make it clear that I thoroughly condemn any real or alternate theories of scientific racism. Anyone who tries to endorse these theories will be quickly reported to the moderators. Please adhere to the rules of this board, and keep in mind the 1978 UNESCO statement on race, from the Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice, quoted in the Wikipedia page referenced above:

  • "All human beings belong to a single species."
  • "All peoples of the world possess equal faculties for attaining the highest level in intellectual, technical, social, economic, cultural and political development."
  • "The differences between the achievements of the different peoples are entirely attributable to geographical, historical, political, economic, social and cultural factors."
  • "Any theory which involves the claim that racial or ethnic groups are inherently superior or inferior, thus implying that some would be entitled to dominate and eliminate others, presumed to be inferior, or which bases value judgements on racial differentiation, has no scientific foundation and is contrary to the moral and ethical principles of humanity."
(Full text of the document can be found here on the UNESCO website for those interested.)
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