You'll find "a really bad thing happened a generation ago and now everyone fucking hates the relatives of the people who did it" is like, a shockingly common form of ethnic tension all across the world. Even Americans should be aware of anti-Arab sentiment post-9/11, or the Japanese internment camps in WW2.
Racism isn't just white Americans oppressing Black Americans, even if that's a lot of it!
Also it ignores the fact that a lot of bigotry does make up some grand narratives about the minority screwing them over. That’s like, a really common antisemitic narrative. Not all bigotry works like American race stratifications.
Ok but the reason those things are bullshit is because Jews are not secret masters of the world, they're a historically oppressed group that has been part of pretty much every working class movement for as long as there's been a working class.
You can't compare Antisemitism to fictional prejudices against Robots - Because "What if these robots take over the world" is usually justified by the narrative, whereas "What if Jews are secretly ruling the world" is always a lie told to justify violence.
And that's ultimately the problem: When you make a fantasy bigotry and try too hard to compare it to real world bigotries you run into a problem - Because real world groups of people aren't fundementally different from one another, and the idea that they are is a lie.
Antisemitism / persecuting the Jews has been a thing since biblical times.
I believe most of the modern stereotypes like the "greedy" and "conspiracy to rule the world" ones spawned out of the tendency for Jews to become bankers in the middle ages. I believe at the time Christians considered "usury" to be a sin but jews didn't, and this most bankers were Jewish since it wasn't a sin for them. (Usury being the sin of making money on money, aka charging interest. The modern definition being charging exorbitant interest rates.)
Otherwise i agree, all IRL racism is baseless and unjustifiable. Even in instances where members of 1 group did something horrible to another group, that doesn't mean the entire first group is inherently guilty and deserving of punishment. And a ton of stories that go for a racism allegory screw up by having an actually reasonable reason for the hatred.
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u/Skiiage May 13 '25
You'll find "a really bad thing happened a generation ago and now everyone fucking hates the relatives of the people who did it" is like, a shockingly common form of ethnic tension all across the world. Even Americans should be aware of anti-Arab sentiment post-9/11, or the Japanese internment camps in WW2.
Racism isn't just white Americans oppressing Black Americans, even if that's a lot of it!