re: Just overheard a guy say "slavery wasn't racist"

CT, I think you took me too literally on the quoted sentence and perhaps didn't consider the rest of the post. What I am getting at is that our American paradigm for understanding "racism" is driven primarily by black/white relations in this country. Slavery, followed by Jim Crow, Civil Rights era, and down to the present day. Even our civil rights laws were made to secure rights "for the Negro," with national origin and even gender blended in to the process. Of course, other groups have experienced racism, but when we as Americans talk about "racism," it's the history of black-white relations that primarily informs our understanding.

You seem to have missed that I referred to slavery as an ancient and varied institution. Slavery has existed, and continues to exist, in very different forms, but it's the peculiar institution of American chattel slavery that most Americans think of and it's the reaction to that institution that informs our understanding of racism.