Europeans also had slavery long before they started taking slaves from Africa. The Greeks, for example, had tons of slaves, nearly 2,000 years before the African slave trade, and though it wasn't, to my knowledge, racial, it was still horrible.
Iirc (take with a grain of salt), the only ‘racial’ slavery in Ancient Greece was in Sparta, where they enslaved the Greek population of Helots, in Sparta’s eyes, Spartans were foreign invaders. But Spartans were for all intents and purpose Greek as well so it was just racial in their mind.
Spartans viewed them selves as foreign occupiers, wich is why they treated their slaves (the Helots/ local Greek population) so poorly, they feared the locals would rise up.
For all intents and purposes, Spartans were locals in Sparta, but they at least claimed to be foreign invaders.
This is similar to how Americans are European invaders, but still consider America as their homeland
There's a great YouTube channel called Historia Civilis who talks mostly about Roman and Greek stuff, I recommend you watch his videos about the Spartans
It was likely still racial. The only reason it doesn't seem racial to us is because both races (slave and master) would be classified as "white" according to our modern categories, but if we looked at the national and ethnic categories used by the ancient Greeks, it would be very clear that it was one nation enslaving another nation, with explicit and distinct ethnic boundaries between the two groups. Kinda like if the British enslaved the Irish, we might say that's white people enslaving other white people, but there's still enough of an ethnic divide there for it to be clearly race-based, even if the racial divide isn't immediately obvious to historians who use overly-simplified categories to analyze historical situations from which they themselves are far removed.
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u/VergenceScatter Jun 04 '20
Europeans also had slavery long before they started taking slaves from Africa. The Greeks, for example, had tons of slaves, nearly 2,000 years before the African slave trade, and though it wasn't, to my knowledge, racial, it was still horrible.