A Thought About The Aftermath of Slavery

In my book club yesterday, someone wondered why prejudice against American blacks remains so long after the emancipation of all slaves, and after the even longer time that free blacks have lived in America.

Other ethnic groups were discriminated against, but generally have overcome prejudice more rapidly. I have read that Irish immigrants to the South in the famine years rioted in port cities to get access to the good and safe jobs that were reserved for slaves. People took an economic loss if a slave were killed or crippled, but an Irish immigrant only cost a wage while working, and a low wage at that. Yet we elected Irish Catholics president 48 and 16 years ago.

The word "slave" comes from "Slav", and the Slavs were once enslaved in parts of Europe. The Slavs seem to have overcome any prejudice that might have hung over from their time of slavery. Indeed, from what I read, there seems to be little prejudice against ex slaves or blacks in Islamic culture.

It was suggested that it is race that makes the difference, and majority white populations are prejudiced against the black descendants of former slaves. Thinking of Brazil, Hispanic American countries, and the United States, that seems likely. Still, racial prejudice takes quite different forms in Portuguese, Spanish and Anglo America, and indeed is different in the southern states of the United States than in other states such as Maryland where slavery existed before emancipation.

The likely explanation is that the nature of the prejudice is a function of the cultural matrix in which it is found, and contingent on the history of the abolition of the slave trade, emancipation, desegregation, and subsequent racial relations. That sounds reasonable, but it is simply giving a name to something i don't understand. What are the differences between these cultures and histories that caused racial prejudices to differ and to be expressed in different ways?