askhistorians

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In his autobiography, Malcolm X says: "During slavery ... it was a rare one of our black grandmothers, our great-grandmothers and our great-great-grandmothers who escaped the white rapist slavemaster ..." Is this true? How widespread was this white male-on-black female rape in the Antebellum South? NSFW	488
Why does St. Augustine refer to Ethiopians as "the remotest and foulest of mankind"?	115
The Rig Veda says: "Blowing away with supernatural might from earth and from the heavens the swarthy skin which Indra hates." This ancient collection of Sanskrit poetry contains a number of racially charged passages. Is this a description of the world's earliest recorded racial conflict?	90
For centuries, "Be Christian or die" was one of a number of methods Christian rulers and missionaries would use to convert the "heathen." How important was forced conversion for the spread of Christianity? Is the conversion of most of Europe and Latin America unimaginable without the use of force?	49
There were hundreds of gospels, letters and revelations used by early Christians before the Christian canon was fixed. Did a similar situation exist in early Judaism with different groups using different versions of the bible (i.e. their own books of Moses) before finalization of the Hebrew canon?	37
Is there an ideology of "whitening" that determines social mobility in Latin American societies, one that encourages non-whites to embrace white culture and intermarry with white or white-looking people to be generally accepted by society? If so, where did this ideology of "whitening" come from?	26
According to post-Marxist philosopher Étienne Balibar, Karl Marx once exclaimed: “I am the true anarchist!” Can anyone locate the reference and maybe provide the context of the quote?	8
From exclusion acts in the US to ethnic cleansing in Mexico, Asian immigrants have long been subject to discrimination at the hands of the dominant racial and cultural groups in North America. Did Asians also experience the same kind of discrimination in Central and South America?	7
When Marx said "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery and wield it for its own purposes" was he not rejecting the necessity of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and, in the process, openly aligning himself with the political philosophy of anarchism?	7
What did the Aztecs, Inca and other Amerindian tribes think of the Africans who sometimes accompanied the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors to the New World? Did they view them in the same light?	6

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