The Historical Origins
and Development of Racism
by George M. Fredrickson
Racism exists when one ethnic group or historical collectivity
dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate another on the basis
of differences that it believes are hereditary and unalterable.
An ideological basis for explicit racism came to a unique fruition
in the West during the modern period. No clear and unequivocal
evidence of racism has been found in other cultures or in Europe
before the Middle Ages. The identification of the Jews with the
devil and witchcraft in the popular mind of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries was perhaps the first sign of a racist view
of the world. Official sanction for such attitudes came in sixteenth
century Spain when Jews who had converted to Christianity and
their descendents became the victims of a pattern of discrimination
and exclusion.
The period of the Renaissance and Reformation was also the time
when Europeans were coming into increasing contact with people
of darker pigmentation in Africa, Asia, and the Americas and were
making judgments about them. The official rationale for enslaving
Africans was that they were heathens, but slave traders and slave
owners sometimes interpreted a passage in the book of Genesis
as their justification. Ham, they maintained, committed a sin
against his father Noah that condemned his supposedly black descendants
to be "servants unto servants." When Virginia decreed in 1667
that converted slaves could be kept in bondage, not because they
were actual heathens but because they had heathen ancestry, the
justification for black servitude was thus changed from religious
status to something approaching race. Beginning in the late seventeenth
century laws were also passed in English North America forbidding
marriage between whites and blacks and discriminating against
the mixed offspring of informal liaisons. Without clearly saying
so, such laws implied that blacks were unalterably alien and inferior.
During the Enlightenment, a secular or scientific theory of race
moved the subject away from the Bible, with its insistence on
the essential unity of the human race. Eighteenth century ethnologists
began to think of human beings as part of the natural world and
subdivided them into three to five races, usually considered as
varieties of a single human species. In the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, however, an increasing number of writers,
especially those committed to the defense of slavery, maintained
that the races constituted separate species.
The Nineteenth century was an age of emancipation, nationalism,
and imperialism--all of which contributed to the growth and intensification
of ideological racism in Europe and the United States. Although
the emancipation of blacks from slavery and Jews from the ghettoes
received most of its support from religious or secular believers
in an essential human equality, the consequence of these reforms
was to intensify rather than diminish racism. Race relations became
less paternalistic and more competitive. The insecurities of a
burgeoning industrial capitalism created a need for scapegoats.
The Darwinian emphasis on "the struggle for existence" and concern
for "the survival of the fittest" was conducive to the development
of a new and more credible scientific racism in an era that increasingly
viewed race relations as an arena for conflict rather than as
a stable hierarchy.
The growth of nationalism, especially romantic cultural nationalism,
encouraged the growth of a culture-coded variant of racist thought,
especially in Germany. Beginning in the late 1870s and early 1880s,
the coiners of the term "antisemitism" made explicit what some
cultural nationalists had previously implied--that to be Jewish
in Germany was not simply to adhere to a set of religious beliefs
or cultural practices but meant belonging to a race that was the
antithesis of the race to which true Germans belonged.
The climax of Western imperialism in the late nineteenth century
"scramble for Africa" and parts of Asia and the Pacific represented
an assertion of the competitive ethnic nationalism that existed
among European nations (and which, as a result of the Spanish-American
War came to include the United States). It also constituted a
claim, allegedly based on science, that Europeans had the right
to rule over Africans and Asians.
The climax of the history of racism came in the twentieth century
in the rise and fall of what might be called overtly racist regimes.
In the American South, the passage of racial segregation laws
and restrictions on black voting rights reduced African Americans
to lower caste status. Extreme racist propaganda, which represented
black males as ravening beasts lusting after white women, served
to rationalize the practice of lynching. A key feature of the
racist regime maintained by state law in the South was a fear
of sexual contamination through rape or intermarriage, which led
to efforts to prevent the conjugal union of whites with those
with any known or discernable African ancestry.
Racist ideology was eventually of course carried to its extreme
in Nazi Germany. It took Hitler and his cohorts to attempt the
extermination of an entire ethnic group on the basis of a racist
ideology. Hitler, it has been said, gave racism a bad name. 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.
Explicit racism also came under devastating attack from the new
nations resulting from the decolonization of Africa and Asia and
their representatives in the United Nations. The Civil Rights
movement in the United States, which succeeded in outlawing legalized
racial segregation and discrimination in the 1960s drew crucial
support from the growing sense that national interests were threatened
when blacks in the United States were mistreated and abused. In
the competition with the Soviet Union for "the hearts and minds"
of independent Africans and Asians, Jim Crow and the ideology
that sustained it became a national embarrassment with possible
strategic consequences.
The one racist regime that survived the Second World War and the
Cold War was the South African in 1948. The laws passed banning
all marriage and sexual relations between different "population
groups" and requiring separate residential areas for people of
mixed race ("Coloreds"), as well as for Africans, signified the
same obsession with "race purity" that characterized the other
racist regimes. However the climate of world opinion in the wake
of the Holocaust induced apologists for apartheid to avoid, for
the most part, straightforward biological racism and rest their
case for "separate development" mainly on cultural rather than
physical differences.
The defeat of Nazi Germany, the desegregation of the American
South in the 1960s, and the establishment of majority rule in
South Africa suggest that regimes based on biological racism or
its cultural essentialist equivalent are a thing of the past.
But racism does not require the full and explicit support of the
state and the law. Nor does it require an ideology centered on
the concept of biological inequality. Discrimination by institutions
and individuals against those perceived as racially different
can long persist and even flourish under the illusion of non-racism,
as historians of Brazil have recently discovered. 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."
Recent examples of a functionally racist cultural determinism
are not in fact unprecedented. They rather represent a reversion
to the way that the differences between groups could be made to
seem indelible and unbridgeable before the articulation of a scientific
or naturalistic conception of race in the eighteenth century.
George M. Fredrickson is Edgar E. Robinson Professor Emeritus
of United States History at Stanford University.
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