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

by George M. Fredrickson

making it possible to question whether its use as a basis for social ranking and privilege was just and reasonable.

The doctrine that “all men are created equal” and endowed with individual rights derived from nature or reason was difficult to reconcile with lifetime servitude and forced ghettoization, unless blacks and Jews were to be considered less than human.

Great Britain, which did not have a democratic revolution but did have a potent humanitarian movement, moved decisively against the slave trade in 1807 and became the first European nation to abolish slavery on a permanent basis in 1833.

He argued instead that changes in the physical and mental characteristics of the races were by-products of a civilizing process that Europeans had undergone, but that most dark-skinned peoples had not.27 While such a theory might not justify slavery, it was compatible with imperial expansion based on the belief that

Europeans were embarked on a “civilizing mission.”

Polygenesis, or more generally the view that the differences that made the races unequal were of great magnitude and unalterable,

Egalitarian norms required special reasons for exclusion.

The one exclusionary principle that could be readily accepted by civic nationalists was biological unfitness for full citizenship.

the Germans, more than any other western Europeans, repudiated the civic nationalist ideal inspired by the Enlightenment and the eighteenth-century revolutions in favor of a concept of national membership based predominantly on ethnic origins rather than human rights.

The civic form of nationalism, in which citizenship is allegedly based on universal human rights rather than ethnic particularities, can become extremely oppressive or exclusionary if some segment of the population is viewed as less than fully human.

his contention that each ethnic group or nation possesses a unique and presumably eternal Volksgeist (or folk soul) laid the foundation for a culture-coded form of racism.

Herder’s tolerant pluralism—his refusal to associate cultural difference with inferiority—was not maintained by the romantic nationalists who came to dominate patriotic discourse in Germany during and after the Napoleonic invasions.

the belief took hold that Americans loved liberty and showed an aptitude for self-government, not so much because these were universal human traits, as because their Anglo-Saxon ancestors invented democratic institutions in the forests of Germany, carried them to England, and then to the United States.

Americans tried to embrace the democratic universalism of the Enlightenment, while at the same time being proud bearers of a specific ethnoracial identity that was sometimes conceived of as Anglo-Saxon, sometimes as northern European, but most often as simply

European or white.

Germany by contrast came to embrace an ethnoracial particularism that was explicitly anti-Enlightenment and antimodern, one that affirmed traditional divisions of estate or class among the dominant group but left no place for Jews as Jews.

Racism is always nationally specific. It invariably becomes enmeshed with searches for national identity and cohesion that vary with the historical experience of each country.

“a social formation,” racism must, in their words, become a “political project” that “creates or reproduces structures of domination based on essentialist categories of race.”

Slavery was a legal status that could be, and often was, defended on grounds other than race.

Conservatives who had refused to adapt to “the age of the common man” declared that a social hierarchy with a menial class at the bottom was essential to any society, although some special reason still had to be found

why blacks (and only blacks) were at the base of the pyramid.

But the federal effort to enforce civic and political equality for blacks during Reconstruction failed because the government proved unwilling or unable to commit sufficient resources or apply enough force to overcome the violent white resistance to black equality that erupted in the South.

Emancipation could not be carried to completion because it exceeded the capacity of white Americans—in the

North as well as in the South—to think of blacks as genuine equals.

In both cases, first of all, federalism served as an obstacle to equal citizenship.

rapid industrialization and

economic growth gave rise to situations where members of the majority were in competition or at least potential competition with members of the outgroup for jobs or other economic opportunities—something that would have been inconceivable in the era of the ghetto and the slave plantation.57

the success of emancipation depended on the fortunes of a liberal-to-radi...

Like the Democrats in the southern United States, the German Conservatives learned that racism could be used, whenever expedient or necessary, to steal the thunder of their populist rivals and keep themselves in firm control.60

both German Jews and American blacks were impeded in their struggles for equality by the international economic downturn that began in 1873.

The belief that government intervention was required to weed out or neutralize inferior breeding stock could justify a variety of policies, including immigration restriction, prohibition of interracial marriage, the forced sterilization of undesirables, and ultimately the euthanasia of entire categories of people.65

“the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage,

were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white.”

In Germany, on the other hand, the zone of actual or potential competition between Jews and gentiles was in the middle or professional classes.

Hence Jews were, unlike African Americans, in direct competition with members of the ethnic majority’s middle class.

“Belief in the superiority of German blood enabled men of lesser rank and status to maintain their pride as Jews rose rapidly in commerce and the professions. Sales clerks and bureaucratic menials, semi-skilled and with a weak grasp on the lower rungs of the middle-class ladder of success, clung to racism to confirm a supposed latent superiority.

Unable to accept socialism because of its attack on private property and traditional values, but nevertheless alienated or threatened by aspects of capitalist development, many in the Mittelstand found irresistible the temptation to blame the Jews for what had gone wrong.

Germans feared that, under modern competitive conditions, which allegedly reward the clever and unscrupulous, Jews might be their superiors. Discrimination was justified, therefore, as a means of self-preservation.72 Most white Americans, on the other hand, believed that blacks were innately incompetent in all ways that mattered.

The political purpose of the Aryan myth (which had arisen from linguistic studies that traced German and other Indo-European languages to ancient Sanskrit) was to distinguish Germans and other northern Europeans from Jews. Since ethnologists generally regarded Semites as a branch of the Caucasian race, mere “whiteness” would not do to designate the master race.

Nativists seeking to restrict immigration from eastern and southern Europe stressed an association between a capacity for self-government and Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-American, or Nordic (not simply white or European) ancestry.

But what the right kind of people inherited from their ancestors was the capacity to be liberal or democratic in the manner prescribed by the Enlightenment and the founding fathers.

American white supremacist ideology was based on an interpretation (or distortion) of the Enlightenment philosophy on which the nation was founded. Science was expected to determine a group’s unfitness for full citizenship before it could be excluded. German antisemitism, on the other hand, was based on a rejection of rationalism, universalism, and the political values that went with them.

the German ideology that would come to fruition in the Nazi era, it is peoples or Völker who have rights, not individuals. As a unique and superior Volk, Germans were entitled to defend themselves by any means necessary against alien blood and values. The crimes against humanity perpetrated by Germans in the twentieth century were rationalized as much by the idealization of themselves as by hatred of the Other.

A critical variable in both of our cases is the economic role the victims of racism played and with which they had become identified.

A culture of racism, once established, can be adapted to more than one agenda and is difficult to eradicate.

The heritage of slavery and beliefs about the savagery of Africa engendered a white supremacist myth that blacks were an inherently unprogressive race, incapable of joining the modern world as efficient and productive people.

In Germany, where modernization was uneven, disruptive, and sharply contested, it was the traditionalist or reactionary resistance to aspects of capitalist-inspired economic and social development and, above all, to the political liberalism with which it was associated in other nations that led to Jews’ being made the symbols and putative agents of frightening or unwanted change. If African Americans were not modern enough, German Jews were too modern.

Prejudice and discrimination, fortified by ideologies claiming that the differences between human groups of apparently divergent ancestry are immutable and have implications for social inclusion or ranking, have a history that goes back to the late Middle Ages.

Those in authority proclaim insistently that the differences between the dominant group and the one that is being subordinated or eliminated are permanent and unbridgeable.

Second, this sense of radical difference