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Quote :"Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt"
Common experiences […] have been historically shared by the most subjugated racial minorities in America and non-white peoples in some other parts of the world…The common features ultimately relate to the fact that the classical colonialism of the imperialist era and American racism developed out of the same historical situation and reflected a common world economic and power stratification. […]The essential condition for both American slavery and European colonialism was the power domination and the technological superiority of the Western world in its relation to peoples of non-Western and non-white origins. This objective supremacy in technology and military power buttressed the West's sense of cultural superiority, laying the basis for racist ideologies that were elaborated to justify control and exploitation of non-white people.
If you ask Blauner, European colonialism (of non-European people) and American racism (against ethnic minorities) have a lot in common. Both systems are based in the economic exploitation of a group of people, and this exploitation was made possible by the fact that Europe and white America were far ahead of the rest of the world in terms of technology and military power.
Just because they had better weapons, Europeans and white Americans came to believe that they were also culturally superior to everyone else—and this belief in their cultural superiority allowed Westerners to justify racism and colonialism to themselves.
Blauner points out that even though Americans sometimes get on their high horse about European colonialism (after all, the U.S. was originally a set of colonies), it's not like the U.S. didn't get into some questionable stuff itself. After all, the Native Americans were colonized, and a big chunk of Mexico was annexed to the U.S. in the 1800s (Texas and California were a part of Mexico once upon a time).