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Noëlle the 8-Bit🏳️🌈🎄
@noelle
TIL about the Cagots, a group of people in France and Spain who experienced systemic hatred and discrimination because... they were Cagots.
They weren't any different from the other people living near them - same skin and hair color, same language, same religion, etc. - but if you were born to a Cagot family, you were a Cagot, and the rest of the people hated and shunned you. And nobody nowadays knows why; the origins of the discrimination have been lost to time.
@woozle @noelle I don’t think it needs to be a threat, even. One of the explanations for the stability of cultures with minimal social mobility (caste systems, strong class systems) is that they forestall resource-use that would otherwise go into competition and can therefore keep more people alive. (So attempts to change kill a lot of people during the transient chaos and change gets a justly bad reputation.)
metapol: mechanics of bigotry Show more
@noelle did Cagots wear cagoules?
@noelle I can't get my head around this, it sounds like a heavy-handed sci-fi metaphor but it's a completely real thing that happened
@aeonofdiscord I know, right? Like if I ran across this in fiction I’d think “the author needs to learn some subtlety”.
@noelle today I read the entire Wikipedia article about Cagots. Fascinating
@noelle Weird. My first guess was that they were the descendents of former heretics, given the location, but I guess the article shows that's considered unlikely.
@noelle This happens a lot in many cultures.
Cagots are similar to Japanese burakumin, Korean baekjeong, and India's dalits (often doing work considered "unclean").
In the case of the burakumin and dalits, they *still* face discrimination despite government protection. They differ in no way from their neighbours in language, but are still ostracised.
Chinese tankas (although they're possibly a separate ethnic group, no one knows where they come from) are also outcasts who live on boats.
@noelle (specifically in the case of the Tankas, it's known they come from China, but it's not exactly known what ethnic group they come from; the leading theory as far as I know is that they were the original inhabitants of Guandong before the Han Chinese displaced them)
metapol (non-US) Show more
@noelle Ya know, I think there might be an emergent system at work there -- basically, powermongers/RWAs need a threat to unite their followers, and minority groups are always a good candidate.