(One in a series of posts on George Fredrickson’s 2002 book, Racism: A Short History.)
Centuries in the making, Western racism came to “a hideous fruition” in the 20th century:
“Its two most persistent and malignant manifestations—the color-coded or white supremacist variety and antisemitism in its naturalistic or secular form—both reached their logical extremes. White supremacy attained its fullest ideological and institutional development in the southern United States between the 1890s and the 1950s, and in South Africa between the 1910s and the 1980s, but especially after 1948. Antisemitism of course reached its horrendous climax in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945.” (p. 99)
Fredrickson defines these three historical examples as “overtly racist regimes” and distinguishes them from “the general run of ethnically pluralistic societies in which racial prejudice contributes significantly to social stratification“. (p. 100-101) “Overtly racist regimes”, according to Fredrickson, have the following characteristics:
- “There is an official ideology that is explicitly racist.“
- “This sense of radical difference and alienation is most clearly and dramatically expressed in laws forbidding interracial marriage.“
- “Social segregation is mandated by law and not merely the product of custom or private act of discrimination that are tolerated by the state.“
- “To the extent that the polity is formally democratic, outgroup members are excluded from holding public office or even exercising the franchise.“
- “The access that they have to resources and economic opportunities is so limited that most of those in the stigmatized category are either kept in poverty or deliberately impoverished.” (p. 101)
Fredrickson treats this definition with the rigor of a mathematical proof, articulating how it does and does not apply to various historical regimes:
“This ideal type of an ‘overtly racist regime’ applies quite well to the American South in the heyday of Jim Crow, to South Africa under apartheid, and to Nazi Germany. Nowhere else were the political and legal potentialities of racism so fully realized.”
He then take a survey through time and space—French and Portuguese colonial possessions, Mexico, Brazil and other Latin American societies with significant black or Indian populations, the northern United States after Reconstruction and through the 20th century, Austria, Poland and other central and eastern European nations where antisemitism was endemic throughout the 1900s, Czarist Russia—to prove that other national regimes do not meet all of the conditions required to “qualify” as an overtly racist regime.
So the question then arises (and will be discussed further in the next post): why these three countries at those particular times, and not any others?
Crossposted at: MassCommons.wordpress.com
