One thing I think most people don't realise is that, uncomfortable as it may seem to acknowledge, prejudices on the grounds of apparent ethnicity, language, culture and habitation....... kinda used to make a lot more sense.

These days, we're literate. We're educated. We have access to the amalgamated repository of all recorded human learning and record. So we know how awful, say, the European settlers displacing the native population of North America really was. We can compare records, multiple perspectives on the time, we can see the unthinking dehumanisation that happened on both sides (yes, both sides, learn your history; if you torture people who look different to death on sight, that's dehumanisation.) But most importantly, we can see the trend over time, the way that European colonisation ravaged the existing continental population with unfamiliar diseases (most of which was unintentional, but not all) and gradually took territorial control of the entire land mass.

We can look at that and judge those who were there, decrying them as greedy unthinking racists motivated by absurd hegemonic ideas. And we wouldn't be wrong, in general terms.

But imagine for a moment that you're not here in 2020 reading a post on the internet. You're a second generation New World colonist with Spanish ancestry, living in a colonial coastal settlement in the mid 17th century. You can't read or write, and even if you could, you wouldn't have realistic access to many books anyway, and what you COULD get would be biased, ignorant, early scholarship, and THAT'S providing it was even a text on anything relevant to what you wanted to find out, and not a random medical text or whatever.

You were born in that place. All you know is that everyone who has ever been decent or kind to you looks a certain way, speaks a certain language, lives in a certain place and believes certain things. The only people you have ever seen who look even slightly different are relentlessly aggressive against you and kill you on sight. You can't communicate with them, speak their language or find out what motivates or drives them. Maybe if you could, you would be able to find out that they hate you because thirty years ago, a group of men that included your father sacked their village, burned their lands, raped their women and enslaved any of their men they could capture. But you can't find that out, because you have absolutely no way of asking anyone who will tell you the truth about it.

Let's spice this up. You're mixed race. Your father was a European Spaniard, born in Spain, here as a soldier and sailor to build and reinforce this place back when it was to be an important fort. Your mother was a native woman who he raped, but later took a liking to and kept as a wife. He fucked off back to Spain while she was pregnant with you (not that he had a choice, when the King recalls you, you go or you die) and you've never known him.

Your mother won't talk about your father. The whiter looking men of the town claim to have purer blood than you, call you a special name for someone of your ethnic combination, and tell you to watch your step around them. As you grow up and look for work to support your poor mother, you find that your opportunities are limited, so you join the militia, one of the few careers in which your progress will not be legally limited as a half caste subject of the Spanish Empire.

After a few uneventful years of manning a tiny, undermanned, and largely crumbling Spanish fort, one day you see sails on the horizon. The townsfolk around you panic. Before you know what's happening, your commander, a proud Spaniard, is telling you that this is your time to die for King and Country, to show the brigands who are about to raid you no fear nor mercy. Your friends from the garrison look around at each other nervously. Desertion is clearly on their minds.

By the end of the day, the fort has been broken and the town ransacked. Bearded, filthy men who speak a strange tongue have you and the other tiny handful of surviving defenders imprisoned. In broken Spanish, they hurl insults at you. You can do nothing as one of the men, drunken and sadistic and merry, picks out a boy you knew to stab in the gut for fun. For the next few hours, you watch your friend die slowly as you all weep and soil yourselves in dread, while the raggedy strangers laugh at you.

Four days of hunger, thirst, beatings and arbitrary executions later, you have survived. The pirates are gone. All the Spaniards born in Spain were hanged, and ironically, your mixed race is the very reason they left you alive.

You find your mother again. A raped and broken woman. Nine months later, she gives birth to a half English baby. The town doesn't know what to make of him.

What is your worldview, in this situation? Can you trust the natives, for whom you're too white? The Spanish townsfolk, for whom you're impure? The Protestants, to whom you're seemingly an animal?

Be glad to be you.