Racism: A Short History (Princeton Classics, 106 Book 18)

by George M. Fredrickson

The moral revulsion of people throughout the world against what the Nazis did, reinforced by scientific studies undermining racist genetics (or eugenics), served to discredit the scientific racism that had been respectable and influential in the United States and Europe before the Second World War.

The moral revulsion of people throughout the world against what the Nazis did, reinforced by scientific studies undermining racist genetics (or eugenics), served to discredit the scientific racism that had been respectable and influential in the United States and Europe before the Second World War. But explicit racism also came under devastating attack by the new nations resulting from the decolonization of Africa and Asia and their representatives in the United Nations.

The use of allegedly deep-seated cultural differences as a justification for hostility and discrimination against newcomers from the Third World in several European countries has led to allegations of a new “cultural racism.”

From the historian’s perspective such recent examples of cultural determinism are not in fact unprecedented. They rather represent a reversion to the way that the differences between ethnoracial groups could be made to seem indelible and unbridgeable before the articulation of a scientific or naturalistic conception of race in the eighteenth century.

From the historian’s perspective such recent examples of cultural determinism are not in fact unprecedented. They rather represent a reversion to the way that the differences between ethnoracial groups could be made to seem indelible and unbridgeable before the articulation of a scientific or naturalistic conception of race in the eighteenth century.

Somewhere between the view that racism is a peculiar modern idea without much historical precedent and the notion that it is simply a manifestation of the ancient phenomenon of tribalism or xenophobia may lie a working definition that covers more than scientific or biological racism but less than the kind of group prejudice based on culture, religion, or simply a sense of family or kinship.2

It is when differences that might otherwise be considered ethnocultural are regarded as innate, indelible, and unchangeable that a racist attitude or ideology can be said to exist.

But racism as I conceive it is not merely an attitude or set of beliefs; it also expresses itself in the practices, institutions, and structures that a sense of deep difference justifies or validates. Racism, therefore, is more than theorizing about human differences or thinking badly of a group over which one has no control. It either directly sustains or proposes to establish a racial order, a permanent group hierarchy that is believed to reflect the laws of nature or the decrees of God.

Racism, therefore, is more than theorizing about human differences or thinking badly of a group over which one has no control. It either directly sustains or proposes to establish a racial order, a permanent group hierarchy that is believed to reflect the laws of nature or the decrees of God. Racism in this sense is neither a given of human social existence, a universal “consciousness of kind,” nor simply a modern theory that biology determines history and culture.

Deterministic cultural particularism can do the work of biological racism quite effectively, as we shall see in more detail in later discussions of völkisch nationalism in Germany and South Africa.

race is now “coded as culture,” that “the central feature of these processes is that the qualities of social groups are fixed, made natural, confined within a pseudo-biologically defined culturalism.”

My theory or conception of racism, therefore, has two components: difference and power.

In all manifestations of racism from the mildest to the most severe, what is being denied is the possibility that the racializers and the racialized can coexist in the same society, except perhaps on the basis of domination and subordination. Also rejected is any notion that individuals can obliterate ethnoracial difference by changing their identities.

What makes Western racism so autonomous and conspicuous in world history has been that it developed in a context that presumed human equality of some kind.

If a culture holds a premise of spiritual and temporal inequality, if a hierarchy exists that is unquestioned even by its lower-ranking members, as in the Indian caste system

It is uniquely in the West that we find the dialectical interaction between a premise of equality and an intense prejudice toward certain groups that would seem to be a precondition for the full flowering of racism as an ideology or worldview.

The Greeks distinguished between the civilized and the barbarous, but these categories do not seem to have been regarded as hereditary. One was civilized if one was fortunate enough to live in a city-state and participate in political life, barbarous if one lived rustically under some form of despotic rule.

Europe was a “persecuting society,” increasingly intolerant, not only of Jews, but also of lepers and anyone whose beliefs or behavior smacked of heresy or deviance at a time when religious and moral conformity were being demanded more insistently than ever before.17

The symbolic association of blackness with evil and death and whiteness with goodness and purity unquestionably had some effect in predisposing light-skinned people against those with darker pigmentation.

The one place where one can perhaps find an anticipation of antiblack racism in the late Middle Ages is in fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century Iberia. Here the association of blackness with slavery was apparently already being made.

In southern Iberia the most conspicuous slaves of light-skinned or tawny Moorish masters were black Africans, and it was natural for Christians, as well as Muslims, to begin to associate sub-Saharan African ancestry with lifetime servitude.

The fact that Europeans were ceasing to enslave other Europeans at the time when African slaves became suddenly and readily available was at the root of white supremacist attitudes and policies;

Africans were not only available for purchase, but they were non-Christians. Hence the temptation to acquire them and to treat them as unfree was a powerful one.

The conversions of the last pagan Slavs of eastern Europe and Russia meant that there were virtually no European populations available for enslavement under the religious sanction.

Inherited social status was nothing new; the concept of “noble blood” had long meant that the offspring of certain families were born with a claim to high status. But when the status of large numbers of people was depressed purely and simply because of their derivation from a denigrated ethnos, a line had been crossed that gave “race” a new and more comprehensive significance.

Unlike the Jews and the Moors, adherents to the great religions that challenged Christianity in the Old World, the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas represented either primal innocence or subhumanity.

The critical question was whether Indians possessed reason, which was taken as the essential indicator of whether they should be accorded full human status.

the crucial distinction between pagans who had never heard the word of Christ, and infidels, like Jews and Muslims, who had

been exposed to the gospel and had rejected it. The former, like the Canary Islanders and the American Indians, could be brought to Christ through an appeal to their innate rational faculties.

The Spanish authorization of black slavery proceeded primarily from the differing legal status of conquered peoples and those obtained as merchandise from areas outside of Spanish jurisdiction.42

awareness of the West African’s unusually dark pigmentation (even when compared with that of the Khoikhoi of southern Africa, who were usually described as being yellow or tan) soon became part of the equation.

But when it became clear that the natives of Brazil who lived in a climate similar to that of West Africa had tawny rather than black skins, questions were raised about the origins of African pigmentation.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain is critical to the history of Western racism because its attitudes and practices served as a kind of segue

between the religious intolerance of the Middle Ages and the naturalistic racism of the modern era.

The idiom remained religious, and what was inherited through the “blood” was a propensity to heresy or unbelief rather than intellectual or emotional inferiority. Innocent “savages” who embraced Spanish civilization and Catholicism did not carry impure blood. Discrimination against Indians persi...

What we have here, therefore, is a quasi-racialized religious nationalism and not a fully racialized secular nationalism of the kind that arose in Germany.

It was in Spain that a widely shared pride in origin first became the basis for a kind of Herrenvolk egalitarianism.47 This “caballero complex” was carried to America in slightly modified form, where it survived into the early nineteenth century.

A white, even if he rides barefoot on horseback, considers himself to be a member of the nobility of the country.”

The presumption of “Christian freedom” was of particular importance to Protestants, because membership in a Protestant church created a sense of religious status that was normally higher and more demanding than permission to attend Mass in a Catholic parish.49

One can therefore trace the origins of the two main forms of modern racism—the color-coded white supremacist variety and the essentialist version of antisemitism—to the late medieval and early modern periods.

Europeans might seek to affirm their status and self-worth through the allegation that the blood in their veins was superior to that of people descended from Jews, or because the color of their skin made them the natural masters of Africans.

Because of their deviation from Christian universalism, these notions lacked the systematic exposition and promulgation that would give them substantial ideological authority.

The modern concept of races as basic human types classified by physical characteristics (primarily skin color) was not invented until the eighteenth century.

At a time when social inequality based on birth was the general rule among Europeans themselves, color-coded racism had little scope for autonomous development.

The scientific thought of the Enlightenment was a precondition for the growth of a modern racism based on physical typology.

What such reactions reveal is that the predominating belief in the unity of mankind and in the environmental sources of physical divergences among groups of human beings did not preclude an aesthetic revulsion against some non-Europeans as ugly, if not monstrous, in appearance.

In the specific case of British India, he notes that British officials remained convinced that their colonial subjects were capable of being fully civilized long after social discrimination against Indians and half-castes had developed in the late eighteenth century.

No thinker better illustrates the dual character of Enlightenment rationalism—its simultaneous challenge to hierarchies based on faith, superstition, and prejudice and the temptation it presented to create new ones allegedly based on reason, science, and history.23

The secular Enlightenment, on the other hand, was a double-edged sword. Its naturalism made a color-coded racism seemingly based on science thinkable and thus set the stage for nineteenth-century biological determinism.

The Enlightenment thus managed to give new salience and potency to the concept of race while at the same time