Racism: A Short History

RACISM

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS     PRINCETON AND OXFORD

GEORGE M. FREDRICKSON

RACISM

A Short

History

with a new foreword by Albert M. Camarillo

Copyright © 2002 by Princeton University Press

Foreword to the Princeton Classics Edition Copyright

© 2015 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

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All Rights Reserved

First Princeton Classics edition printing, with a new foreword by Albert M. Camarillo, 2015

Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-16705-3

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

press.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

For

Donald Fleming,

mentor and

friend

CONTENTS

FOREWORD TO THE

PRINCETON CLASSICS EDITION

Racism: A Short History, published in 2002, was among the last of the many books written by George M. Fredrickson in a long and distinguished career. One of the great historians of his generation and an internationally renowned author, Fredrickson—a dear friend and colleague of mine for over twenty-five years—could not have written Racism early in his career. This seminal overview, a history about shifting ideologies and practices that hinged on ideas about difference and power and the incalculable misery they afflicted on the human condition through the ages, was the product and synthesis of a lifetime of research, teaching, and thinking about the origins of racism. For more than four decades, Fredrickson’s major contributions on the topic influenced two generations of students and colleagues alike. I remember well, when I was a new graduate student in 1970–71 with a keen interest in the history of race relations in America, that my understanding about the intellectual foundations of racial thought was deeply influenced by Fredrickson’s second book, The Black Image in the White Mind (1971). And I, like others who were curious about racism as a transnational phenomenon, found in his third major book, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History (1981), path breaking perspectives on how ideologies of difference based on a white/black paradigm created societies where race defined one’s life chances from birth to death.

Fredrickson joined the Stanford Department of History faculty in 1984, and a few years later we began a decade long collaboration, co-teaching a course on race in the American experience. I viewed firsthand how Fredrickson continued to refine his thinking about race as an idea: its origins, continuities, and changes across time and space. Racism: A Short History was, thus, the culmination of Fredrickson’s lifelong intellectual journey as a historian in pursuit of understanding how ideas about race evolved and infected modern western societies. The publication of the Princeton Classics edition of Racism is testament to the durable intellectual contributions made by George M. Fredrickson in the study of race and its byproducts.

Although I first met Fredrickson when he was a Northwestern University professor visiting Stanford as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1977–78, it was not until he joined the Stanford faculty that I learned how his personal experiences with race relations were intimately linked to his academic interests. Born in Connecticut but raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, he attended Harvard University for both his undergraduate and graduate studies. Fredrickson was among the hundreds of white college students who traveled to the South to support civil rights efforts during some of the most violent years of struggle for African Americans. Later, as a young faculty member at Northwestern, he supported the rights of students to demonstrate peacefully against the war in Southeast Asia and was a strong advocate for the development of Black Studies on campus. When I learned about this personal background, I came to understand better the passion that he brought to the study of race, an intellectual passion shaped in part by his personal commitment to racial equality.

Fredrickson’s reputation as one of the premier comparative historians of race—and comparative history in general—was cemented with the publication of White Supremacy, which won the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1982. Anchored by his masterful understanding of slavery and white/black relations in the American South, Fredrickson ventured into South African history to produce a brilliant comparative analysis. With great clarity and insight, White Supremacy is a model for comparative historians to follow. Fredrickson’s book illuminates how different national histories and circumstances, the role of federal governments and their institutional policies, framed by ideologies about racial differences, combined to form two distinctive systems of race relations across the Atlantic. White Supremacy was the springboard in Fredrickson’s continuing search for understanding the origins of racial thought beyond national, cultural, and religious boundaries.

In 1988, seventeen of Fredrickson’s essays and articles, most of which were written during the previous twenty years and based on research for The Black Image in the White Mind and White Supremacy, were published as The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality. This collection delves deeper into some issues not fully explored in his two previous books and, in the author’s words, was intended to provide commentary on other historians’ interpretations so as to engage dialogue and debate among scholars [because] it is not only healthy but also indispensable to the historical enterprise. The book was, he said, my contribution to the ongoing discussion of the role of ‘race’ in American history. Again, Fredrickson’s scholarship reflected a personal concern for social inequality, whether in the U.S., South Africa, or elsewhere. Placing racial inequality in the broader context of class inequality framed by Marxian analyses, Fredrickson stated in the introduction of the book both his theoretical stance and his personal abhorrence for racism under any regime:

I regard racial injustice as a distinctive evil, more heinous than the class inequality found in liberal capitalist societies. What occurred in the American South during the era of slavery and segregation, what is occurring now in South Africa, and—to take the extreme case of racism carried to its logical conclusion—what happened in Germany during World War II make it hard to deny that demoting other people from the ranks of humanity on grounds of race or ethnicity, and treating them accordingly, is a sin of unique and horrendous character. (The Arrogance of Race, 7)

Obviously, the death knell of apartheid in South Africa weighed heavily on his mind in 1988. The end of this system of racial inequality in the early 1990s prompted Fredrickson to broaden his analysis of racism as a concept and as a system of social relations. So, too, did teaching courses at Stanford University on comparative studies of race and ethnicity in America and sharing ideas with colleagues whose work also focused on race and ethnic relations. By co-teaching courses with him throughout the 1990s and co-sponsoring a faculty seminar, I witnessed firsthand how Fredrickson expanded the scope and chronology for understanding racism and its various effects on groups in the U.S. and elsewhere.

In the early 1990s, Fredrickson and I co-taught Race and Ethnicity in the American Experience, a survey course that examined how ideologies of race were manifest in societal institutions and policies that shaped the socioeconomic status of communities of color in North America from the colonial era (British and Spanish) through the twentieth century. Fredrickson primarily focused on the African American and Native American experience through the nineteenth century, and I examined the experiences of Asians, Southern and Eastern Europeans, and Mexicans in the twentieth century. We designed the course to emphasize comparisons between and among groups and, in the process, we both sharpened our respective analyses of how dominant conceptions about racial differences defined various group experiences in different regions of the nation over time. This course morphed into another course we developed and co-taught in the late 1990s, Comparative Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity, which introduced students to multidisciplinary and interpretive approaches based on lectures from dozens of Stanford faculty across the disciplines (the content of the lectures for this course eventually resulted in the publication of Doing Race: 21 Essays in the Twentieth First Century, edited by Paula Moya and Hazel Markus, 2010). These courses, which we offered for more than a decade, were influenced by our participation in a Mellon Foundation–supported, interdisciplinary faculty seminar on Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity that Fredrickson and I co-sponsored from 1992 to 1994. These seminars provoked us all to think more broadly and comparatively about our own perspectives on historical and contemporary issues involving race and ethnicity and to learn from colleagues across the disciplines.

The Mellon seminars on Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity also played a key role in establishing the intellectual foundations for a new center at Stanford with the same title. Not surprisingly, Fredrickson was one of the principal founders of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity in 1996 (he served as the co-director of the center’s Research Institute with Claude Steele, the renowned social psychologist, and I served as the center’s director). In addition to the undergraduate degree programs CCSRE offers, its Research Institute sponsors conferences, colloquia, fellowships for graduate students and visiting scholars, and an ongoing seminar series. These seminars provided many faculty affiliated with the center, Fredrickson among them, an opportunity to introduce their current work. Indeed, the genesis of his Racism: A Short History can be traced in part to a seminar paper he presented at the first CCSRE seminar. He published a revised version of this paper as chapter five (Understanding Racism: Reflections of a Comparative Historian) in The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements (University of California Press, 1997). This book in general provided much of the groundwork over the next several years for the writing of Racism.

Invited to present a series of talks as part of the Princeton University Public Lecture Series, Fredrickson used this opportunity to draft the manuscript for Racism. The book demonstrates the genius of a master scholar reflecting on his lifelong work on the study of racial inequality from comparative perspectives. He drew heavily on his pioneering work on slavery and racism in the American South and his comparative analyses of apartheid in South Africa to describe what he refers to as overtly racist regimes. He adds Hitler’s Germany to this category, and in so doing opens the door to exploring the roots of antisemitism in Europe during the Middle Ages. Fredrickson’s conception of racial inequality and racism, as ideology and practice in

Western societies over the past half millennium, thus is based on three primary components: ideas of racial purity, cultural essentialism or particularism, and a them vs. us mindset in which difference and power (and powerlessness) structured racist regimes. He poignantly states that Deterministic cultural particularism can do the work of biological racism quite effectively, and in using this framework, he shows how American, German, and South African nationalism produced regimes that segregated and annihilated populations deemed culturally and/or inherently racially different.

Interestingly, his starting point for identifying the origins of racism was the religious/cultural persecution of Jews in Medieval Europe. Although antisemitism in the Middle Ages did not encompass a racialization of Jews in the modern sense, demonization, prejudice, and views of Jews as antithetical to Christians formed, Fredrickson claims, a fundamental part of the edifice of racism as he defines it. He noted, importantly, that If racial antisemitism had medieval antecedents in the tendency to see Jews as agents of the devil and thus, for all practical purposes, beyond redemption and outside the circle of Christian fellowship, the other principal form of modern racism—the color-coded, white-over-black variety—did not have significant medieval roots. (26) Fredrickson astutely traces how ideas about difference beginning with the age of discovery were affected by religious traditions, slavery, and encounters of European colonizers with indigenous peoples of the New World and with Africans. Consequently, as he points outs, not all of the people of color encountered by Europeans met a similar fate. But once color-coded racism joined hands with deterministic cultural particularism and, as Fredrickson notes, was emancipated from Christian universalism and disassociated from traditionalist conceptions of social hierarchy, the full force of modern racism took hold and characterized various racist societal regimes. (47)

The chronological and thematic organization of Racism follows Fredrickson’s conceptions of how racism, in its various guises, developed in different societies over time. Thus, he begins Part I with an essay on Religion and the Invention of Racism, and Part II examines The Rise of Modern Racisms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Part III focuses on both the apex and decline of racist regimes in the twentieth century. He concludes the book with a poignant commentary about the legacies of Racism at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century and an appendix that provides a useful discussion of historiography.

For any scholar who engages in the study of race and racism, George M. Fredrickson’s Racism: A Short History is the necessary starting point. With its publication as part of a stellar collection of classic books reissued by Princeton University Press, Racism will continue to be read and appreciated as a foundational contribution from a master of his craft.

Albert M. Camarillo

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the course of carrying this project to fruition I have acquired many debts. To Professor Constantin Fasolt of the University of Chicago I owe the original suggestion that I write a short book on racism in world historical perspective. Although I did not in the end fulfill his hope that I would contribute such a volume to a series he edits, I would not have been emboldened to undertake something of this breadth without his initial encouragement. I want to thank the Princeton University Public Lectures Committee and Professor Nancy Weiss Malkiel, Dean of the Faculty, for inviting me to give the series of lectures on which this book is based. Brigitta van Rheinberg of Princeton University Press guided this work from the beginning and made valuable recommendations concerning structure and emphasis. Providing very helpful critiques of all or part of the manuscript at various stages of development were Benjamin Braude, Sean Dobson, John Cell, Norman Naimark, David Nirenberg, John Torpey, Eric Weitz, Howard Winant, and John Worth. These eminent scholars of course bear no responsibility for any errors that remain. David Holland provided invaluable assistance in helping me to prepare the manuscript for publication.

RACISM

INTRODUCTION

The term racism is often used in a loose and unreflective way to describe the hostile or negative feelings of one ethnic group or people toward another and the actions resulting from such attitudes. But sometimes the antipathy of one group toward another is expressed and acted upon with a single-mindedness and brutality that go far beyond the group-centered prejudice and snobbery that seem to constitute an almost universal human failing. Hitler invoked racist theories to justify his genocidal treatment of European Jewry, as did white supremacists in the American South to explain why Jim Crow laws were needed to keep whites and blacks separated and unequal.

The climax of the history of racism came in the twentieth century in the rise and fall of what I will call overtly racist regimes. In the American South, the passage of segregation laws and restrictions on black voting rights reduced African Americans to lower-caste status, despite the constitutional amendments that had made them equal citizens. Extreme racist propaganda, which represented black males as ravening beasts lusting after white women, served to rationalize the practice of lynching. These extralegal executions were increasingly reserved for blacks accused of offenses against the color line, and they became more brutal and sadistic as time went on; by the early twentieth century victims were likely to be tortured to death rather than simply killed. 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 discernible African ancestry.

The effort to guarantee race purity in the American South anticipated aspects of the official Nazi persecution of Jews in the 1930s. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 prohibited intermarriage or sexual relations between Jews and gentiles, and the propaganda surrounding the legislation emphasized the sexual threat that predatory Jewish males presented to German womanhood and the purity of German blood. Racist ideology was of course eventually carried to a more extreme point in Nazi Germany than in the American South of the Jim