Author: MassCommons

(Now that it’s Election Day 2015, the Politics department here at MassCommons World Headquarters has grudgingly agreed to start writing about the 2016 presidential race.)

We don’t do predictions.  This isn’t a pregame show or a Beltway cocktail party.

On the other hand, we’ve had a thought for some months now about how the presidential race might turn out, so we’re going to write it down now just in case it does turn out that way—not so we can say “I told you so” (satisfying though that might be) but so we can at least say “I thought so“.

The thought is this: nothing is going to change.  This is going to be the election campaign equivalent of World War I trench warfare—not because it will be so ugly, but because it won’t move more than a few yards back or forth.

Right now, just as she has all year, Hillary Clinton is the likely Democratic nominee and she has an edge over any of a handful of likely Republican nominees.  That’s how it’s going to stay for the next 12 months.

The economy will keep chugging along in low gear, adding a couple hundred thousand jobs a month.  Whatever global crises there are will not result in a major new war involving hundreds of thousands of US troops.  President Obama’s popularity and job approval ratings will stay roughly where they are now (and have been for years).

On Election Day 2016, Clinton will win a narrow but solid victory and become the first female president in US history.  Republicans will still control the House of Representatives.  Democrats may (or may not) narrowly retake the Senate.

That’s the thought.  It’s not a prediction.  The economy could slip into recession.  Violence overseas or terrorist attacks on US soil could draw the nation into another long, bloody and debilitating war.  Clinton could campaign poorly or an opponent could campaign brillliantly.  Any of a thousand unexpected and improbable events could reshape the campaign.

But the long, slow demographic shift that’s reshaping American society—not unlike the demographic shift in the wake of the great European migration in the late 19th-early 20th century—continues to grind forward, giving Clinton (or any Democratic nominee) a slight, but significant advantage.  That same shift—combined with the distribution of populations, the peculiarities of the American electoral system, and the emergence of two distinct electorates for presidential and off-year elections—means Republicans will continue to wield power in Congress and a majority of states.

There may come a time when the scales do tip and Democrats seize control, forcing a radical reshaping of the Republican coalition (or the party’s collapse, to be replaced by another center-right coalition party), but that time is not now.

Crossposted at: masscommons.wordpress.com

(One in a series of posts on George Fredrickson’s 2002 book, Racism: A Short History.)

Why does Fredrickson spend much of the final chapter of Racism: A Short History writing about Nazi Germany, the Jim Crow South (US), and apartheid South Africa?

A justification for focusing on the admittedly exceptional and extreme cases of Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa, and the Jim Crow South is that they taught the world a lesson about the consequences of rampant and unchecked racism that eventually changed the standards for internationally acceptable conduct.  The emergence of racism as a central human rights issue during the course of the century resulted mainly from the attention paid to these regimes by people beyond their borders.  Their rise and fall were major events, not only in the history of these countries themselves, but also in the history of the world.  They should not therefore be considered or compared in isolation but only in the international contexts that first influenced their emergence and then contributed to their demise.  The story of racism in the twentieth century is one story with several subplots rather than merely a collection of tales that share a common theme. (p. 103-104)<!–more–>

One common factor among these three overtly racist regimes is “the extent to which the racial Other came to be identified with national defeat and humiliation“. (p. 106)  Hitler, the Nazi party, and other German antisemites blamed Jews—both German and international—for Germany’s defeat in World War I.  African-Americans played a pivotal role in defeating the Confederate army during the Civil War, and sustaining Republican rule during Reconstruction.  Africans generally supported the British in the Boer War and opposed Afrikaner self-determination.

In all these cases, the actual perpetrators of defeat and humiliation—the American North, the Allies in World War I, and Great Britain—were too powerful to be within the reach of reprisal, at least in the short run.  Scapegoating the available and vulnerable Other was one way of dealing with the bitterness and frustration resulting from the failure of nationalist projects.  (p. 106)

In addition to identifying the similarities among the three regimes, Fredrickson is diligent about pointing out the differences:

“The fact that Nazi Germany in the 1930s was on the path from being merely an overtly racist regime to being a deliberately genocidal one distinguishes it quite sharply from the American and South African cases.” (p. 125-126)

“South Africa after 1948 designed and constructed the most comprehensive racist regime meant to be a permanent structure that the world has ever seen.  (The architects of the Nazi regime of course viewed their handiwork as the process that would lead to a society in which there would be no racial distinctions because there would be only one race.) (p. 133)

Both world wars had a significant impact on group relations in all three countries.  World War I was a “shattering and demoralizing experience” (p. 117) for Germany, and its conclusion laid the groundwork for the Nazis’ rise to power.  Indirectly, the war brought an end “to the age of Western imperial expansion that had provided a context for the legitimization of racial Darwinism“. (p. 114)  In the United States this resulted in a chipping away at the building blocks of Jim Crow.  In South Africa, the fears of the white minority led to increased controls on African workers and voters.

“The Second World War, into which Hitler plunge the world, was the climax and turning point in the history of racism in the twentieth century.  It, and the Cold War that followed quickly on its heels, revolutionized the context within which groups thought of as ‘races’ confronted each other and interacted.” (p. 127)

None of the 20th century overtly racist regimes was dismantled solely, or even primarily, because of internal pressure.  Nazi Germany was only defeated by the bloodiest war in human history.  What Fredrickson calls “the horrible truth revealed by the liberation of the death camps” (p. 128) undermined the legitimacy of Jim Crow.  The decolonization of Africa and Asia within the context of the Cold War provided powerful international pressure for the United States to dismantle it.  South Africa’s apartheid regime used its anticommunist position (Marxist ideology was insistently, dangerously “nonracialist”) to win Western support, but as the Cold War collapsed international pressure on South Africa led to the release from prison of Nelson Mandela and elections on a “one person, one vote” basis.

That’s not to say that indigenous anti-racist movements had no impact, just that none of them had enough power to win in the absence of powerful international allies.

Other posts in this series include:

Racism: A Short History

Religion & The Invention Of Racism In Early Modern Europe – Part 1

Religion & The Invention Of Racism In Early Modern Europe – Part 2

Religion & The Invention Of Racism In Early Modern Europe – Part 3

Science, Beauty & The Enlightenment In The Rise Of Modern Racism

Democratic Nationalism & The Rise Of Racism

Racism & The Rise Of Overtly Racist Regimes In The 20th Century

Crossposted at: MassCommons.wordpress.com

On Sunday the Boston Globe printed an opinion column from MoveOn’s Anna Galland in which she urged Sen. Elizabeth Warren to run for president:

Our country will be better off if she does. She would be a strong candidate — one who injects valuable ideas into the conversation and ensures the kind of debate our country needs. And she could win.  Put simply, this moment was made for Elizabeth Warren.

The Globe also published a piece by Bloomberg Businessweek correspondent Joshua Green in which he began by wistfully observing, “Although she took her time doing it, Elizabeth Warren seems to have finally convinced the panting obsessives of the Washington press corps that she isn’t going to run for president next year. Her decision is a big loss for Democrats…“, before (somewhat oddly) proceeding to list all the reasons he thought Warren should run anyway.

And the Globe published an essay from The American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner in which he predicted that if Sen. Warren ran for president, “she would take the party rank-and-file by storm“.  This after his opening assertion, “I take Elizabeth Warren at her word that she doesn’t want to run for president in 2016 and is unlikely to become a candidate any time soon“.

To top it off (actually, to lead it off—the Globe printed this editorial above the fold and on the front page of its “Ideas” section, when its customary practice is to keep editorials inside, at the end of the section), the Globe ran an editorial calling on, nay, beseeching Sen. Warren to reconsider her decision not to run for president, concluding (somewhat weakly) that “Warren could enrich the political process for years to come” if she did change her mind.

Other people have made this point more quickly and more articulately than I, but this is bad advice to Warren that comes off as an embarrassing combination of hometown boosterism and out-of-touch liberal Massachusetts arrogance.

Sen. Warren—remarkably for a freshman senator—effectively controls Democratic appointments to high-ranking banking and finance positions (e.g., the Federal Reserve and Dept. of Treasury) in the Obama administration.  On the issues she cares about, she not only can get media attention any time she speaks, she also has the power to bend almost any piece of legislation towards the ends she supports.  It makes no sense for her to give up that power for a quixotic campaign against a hugely (unprecedentedly) popular party leader.

(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:

   
1. “There is an official ideology that is explicitly racist.“

   

2. “This sense of radical difference and alienation is most clearly and dramatically expressed in laws forbidding interracial marriage.“

   

3. “Social segregation is mandated by law and not merely the product of custom or private act of discrimination that are tolerated by the state.“

   

4. “To the extent that the polity is formally democratic, outgroup members are excluded from holding public office or even exercising the franchise.“

   

5. “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

(One in a series of posts on George Fredrickson’s 2002 book, Racism: A Short History.)

How is it, Fredrickson asks, that “pre-Darwinian scientific racism flowered in France and the United States” (p. 68)—nation-states that were heirs to revolutions based on the notion of equal rights for all citizens—much more so than in a constitutional monarchy like England?

His answer is that it is partly because of this emerging civic nationalist ideology that Western racism continues to rise throughout the nineteenth century.

“The one exclusionary principle that could be readily accepted by civic nationalists was biological unfitness for full citizenship.  The precedent of excluding women, children, and the insane from the electorate and denying them equality under the law could be applied to racial groups deemed by science to be incompetent to exercise the rights and privileges of democratic citizenship.  In France, the question was theoretical because there were no significant racial minorities.  But in the United States a true ‘Herrenvolk democracy’ emerged during the Jacksonian period, when the right to vote was extended to all white males and denied to virtually all blacks, including some who had previously voted under a franchise restricted to property holders.” (p. 68-69)

Germany in the 1800s was, for Fredrickson’s purposes, largely defined by its reaction against Enlightenment universalism and the new civic nationalism of the French—not surprisingly, given what Napoleon’s armies did to the Germans.

“During the course of the nineteenth century, 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.  Defining themselves culturally and linguistically rather than in terms of territorially based rights of citizenship originally served as compensation for the failure of the German-speaking peoples to unify politically and become a single nation-state.” (p. 69)

In looking at the development over time of racism as an ideology, Fredrickson observes that “racism is always nationally specific” and then narrows his focus to “…the United States and Germany in the period between the mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth…” when the political projects that “…brought racism to ideological fruition and gave it the independent capacity to shape the societies and polities of the United States and Germany…” arose as “…organized efforts to reverse or limit the emancipation of blacks in the former country and of Jews in the latter.” (p. 75)

After tracing the outlines of the (ultimately failed, or at best, limited) attempts at emancipation in each country, Fredrickson looks at the similarities and differences between the two cases.  First, the similarities:

   
• “In both cases…federalism served as an obstacle to equal citizenship.” (p. 82)

   

• “(R)apid 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.” (p. 82)

   

• “(T)he success of emancipation depended on the fortunes of a liberal-to-radical political movement.” (p. 83)

   

• As those liberal movements waned, both countries experienced “the rise of parties and factions committed to exploiting Negrophobia or antisemitism.” (p. 84)

   

• Finally, “although it is more accidental or contingent than the other similarities, both German Jews and American blacks were impeded in their struggles for equality by the international economic downturn that began in 1873.” (p. 84-85)

And then the differences, which Fredrickson argues, “are even more significant” (p. 86):

   
• “(T)he economic and social competition set off by emancipation involved different classes or strata of society.”  (Freed slaves in the US competing mainly with poor and working-class whites, German Jews competing with middle-class and professional gentiles.)

   

• “In Germany, volkisch nationalism was explicitly promoted as antithetical to liberalism and the heritage of the Enlightenment…. (meanwhile) 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.” (p. 91-92)

In comparing the two nations, Fredrickson concludes that in a national snapshot taken in 1900 CE, “there is no question that the American color line was much more rigid than the barriers between Jews and gentiles in Germany” and then suggests, with a touch of foreshadowing, that the “logical outcome of the blood-based folk nationalism increasingly embraced by the Germans was the total exclusion or elimination of the Jews” whereas “the American conception of citizenship had to include blacks once their full humanity was acknowledged“. (p. 93-94)

He hastens to add that 20th century developments—Germany’s “Final Solution” and the dismantling of Jim Crow in the United States—were not inevitable.  “Historical preconditions do not usually become determinants unless there are some intervening circumstances or contingencies“. (p. 94)

 

Crossposted at: MassCommons.wordpress.com

(One in a series of posts on George Fredrickson’s 2002 book, Racism: A Short History.)

Fredrickson begins the second chapter of Racism: A Short History by reemphasizing both the extent to which Europeans had developed racist ideologies in the centuries leading up to the 1700s CE, and the limits that constrained those ideologies:

“When Europeans of the late medieval and early modern periods invoked the will of God to support the view that differences between Christians and Jews, or between Europeans and Africans were ineradicable, they were embracing a racist doctrine.  The curses on Jews for the killing of Christ and on blacks for the sins of Ham could serve as supernaturalist equivalents of biological determinism for those seeking to deny humanity to a stigmatized group.  But the highest religious and temporal authorities generally avoided sanctioning this form of ethnic predestination.” (p. 51)

While there were unorthodox beliefs (e.g., the theory of human polygenesis) floating around, “the orthodox Christian belief in the unity of mankind, based on the Bible’s account of Adam and Eve as the progenitors of all humans, was a powerful obstacle to the development of a coherent and persuasive ideological racism.” (p. 52)

It’s not until the 18th century that Europeans develop the modern conception of “race” based primarily on skin color.  “The scientific thought of the Enlightenment was a pre-condition for the growth of a modern racism based on physical typology.” (p. 56)  Scientific giants like Linneaus and Blumenthal (the father of physical anthropology) “opened the way to a secular or scientific racism by considering human beings part of the animal kingdom rather than viewing them in biblical terms…“. (p. 57)

Fredrickson also argues that “the purely aesthetic aspect of eighteenth-century racial attitudes deserves more attention…” (p. 59) and that “aesthetic prejudice may have been more central to the negative assessments of non-Europeans and Jews in the eighteenth century than the tentative and ambiguous verdict of science about their intellectual capacities“. (p. 61)  Basically, white Europeans of the day (and their American cousins)—while they debated whether other races were the intellectual and moral equals of whites—had little doubt that whites were the most beautiful race (a conclusion based in part on neoclassical conceptions of beauty inspired by “the milky whiteness of marble and the facial features and bodily form of the Apollos and Venuses that were coming to light” (p. 59) with the rediscovery of Greek and Roman statuary.

Fredrickson calls the Enlightenment “a double-edged sword” in the development of modern racism:

“Its naturalism made a color-coded racism seemingly based on science thinkable and thus set the stage for nineteenth-century biological determinism.  But at the same time, it established in the minds of some a premise of equality in this world rather than merely in heaven or under God, an assumption that could call into question the justice and rationality of black slavery and Jewish ghettoization.“

And he points to Voltaire (“the first thoroughgoing modern racist” p. 62) as an example of “the dual character of Enlightenment rationalism—its simultaneous challenge to hierarchies based on faith, superstitution, and prejudice and the temptation it presented to create new ones allegedly based on reason, science, and history.” (p. 63):

“(Voltaire’s) opinion of the black or African ‘species’ can only be described as extremely dismissive and derogatory.  His reading of the Old Testament and his observations of the contemporary descendants of the ancient Hebrews made him thoroughly unsympathetic, not only to Judaism, but also to Jews….

On another level, however, his general defense of religious toleration and civil liberties promised more to Jews than did the traditional Christian view….  Despite his contempt for blacks, Voltaire was generally critical of slavery and condemned Christianity for having tolerated it.”  (pp. 62-63)

Crossposted at: masscommons.wordpress.com

(One in a series of posts on George Fredrickson’s 2002 book, Racism: A Short History.)

If there’s a time and place that signals the start of the current human era, it’s the first four months of 1492 on the Iberian peninsula when in quick succession, Los Reyes Católicos (The Catholic Monarchs) Isabella of Castile and her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon, 1) oversaw the end of the Reconquista on Jan. 2 when the capital city of the last Muslim kingdom in Iberia, Granada, capitulated; 2) issued the Edict of Expulsion on March 31, exiling all Jews from the Kingdom; and 3) signed an agreement on April 17 with Christopher Columbus authorizing him to set sail to the west on behalf of the Crown.

Fredrickson’s primary interest in this is the treatment of the conversos, the hundreds of thousands of Jews who converted to Christianity rather than leave Spain.  The rise of the doctrine of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) and its inclusion in the laws and regulations of numerous institutions and local governments—under which only those of “pure” Christian ancestry could hold certain jobs (including the ranks of the conquistadores and missionaries settling the Americas)—is, he argues, a key moment in the development of Western racism.

“To the extent that it was enforced, the Spanish doctrine of purity of blood was undoubtedly racist.  It represented the stigmatization of an entire ethnic group on the basis of deficiencies that allegedly could not be eradicated by conversion or assimilation….  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.”

In the Americas, 16th century Spaniards ultimately decided that the newly conquered peoples “possessed reason” and “therefore could be converted to Christianity and made useful subjects of the Spanish crown through peaceful persuasion“.  (p. 38) (They also could be brutally oppressed in the encomienda system, but that’s another issue.)

Fredrickson argues that “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“.  In other words, because the Spaniards and Portuguese (largely because of their inability to survive there) couldn’t conquer west and central African peoples but bought them through pre-existing slave markets, Africans could be kept as slaves.  Conquered peoples in the Americas were in a different category; they could be mistreated and discriminated against, but not enslaved.

Some other points Fredrickson makes about the critical role played by 16th and 17th century Iberians in the development of Western racism:

   
• “It is paradoxical to find that Spain and Portugal were in the forefront of European racism or protoracism in their discrimination against converted Jews and Muslims,, but that the Iberian colonies manifested a greater acceptance of intermarriage and more fluidity of racial categories and identities than the colonies of other European nations.” (p. 39)

   

• “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.” (p. 40)

   

• “One might be tempted to draw a parallel with the relation of German national identity to racial antisemitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but such an analogy should not be pressed too far…. 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.” (p. 41)

   

• “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.” (p. 46)

Fredrickson ends—in a passage that’s worth quoting at length—this chapter with a pivot to the crucial role played by the Enlightenment in the rise of modern racism:

“…to achieve its full potential as an ideology, racism had to be emancipated from Christian universalism.  To become the ideological basis of a social order, it also had to be clearly disassociated from traditionalist conceptions of social hierarchy.  In a society in which inequality based on birth was the norm for everyone from king down to peasant, ethnic slavery and ghettoization were special cases of a general pattern—very special in some ways—but still not radical exceptions tot he hierarchical premise.  Paradoxical as it may seem, the rejection of hierarchy as the governing principle of social and political organization, and its replacement by the aspiration for equality in this world as well as in the eyes of God, had to occur before racism could come to full flower.” (p. 47)

Crossposted at: masscommons.wordpress.com

(One in a series of posts on George Fredrickson’s 2002 book, Racism: A Short History.)

If, as French historian Léon Poliakov wrote (and Fredrickson cites), “For the organization of Christianity it was essential that the Jews be a criminally guilty people” (p. 18), and that fundamental anti-Judaism laid the groundwork for the rise of antisemitism, then the same is not true for white-over-black racism.  Quite the contrary.

The first convert to Christianity recorded in the New Testament (Acts 8:27 ff.) was an Ethiopian.  The late medieval myth of Prester John, a non-European Christian monarch who would join European Christians in the struggle against Islam, located the king in Ethiopia.  Nativity scenes represented one of the three Magi (Gaspar) as a black man.  Black saints—like Gregory the Moor—were venerated.  There’s even the surprising case of St. Maurice who “quite suddenly turned black—at least in the Germanic lands“.  (p. 28)  While medieval European culture tended to associate “blackness with evil and death and whiteness with goodness and purity”, Fredrickson argues this can be exaggerated, asking rhetorically, “If black always had unfavorable connotations, why did many orders of priests and nuns wear black instead of white or some other color?” (p. 26)

Fredrickson traces the beginnings of European antiblack racism to the Iberian peninsula in the late Middle Ages, before the rise of modern Spain and while the Muslim Kingdom of Granada still controlled much of the Mediterranean coast:

“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.  When Portuguese navigators acquired slaves of their own as a result of their voyages along the Guinea Coast in the mid- to late fifteenth century and offered them for sale in the port cities of Christian Iberia, the identification of black skins with servile status was complete.” (p. 29)

All of this happened roughly at the same time Europeans stopped enslaving one another.  Increasingly the European economy was based on ownership of property (especially land).  By contrast, the African economy was based non-ownership of land and ownership of people.  As the Portuguese pushed further south along the west African coast throughout the 1400s, they found a vigorous local slave trade already in existence.  Fredrickson concludes, “…the initial purchase and transport of African slaves by Europeans could easily be justified in terms of religious and legal status without recourse to an explicit racism“. (p. 31)

crossposted at: masscommons.wordpress.com

(One in a series of posts on George Fredrickson’s 2002 book, Racism: A Short History.)

Ancient Greeks “distinguished between the civilized and the barbarous“; Romans between slaves and citizens; Christians and Jews between believers and unbelievers, but racism as we understand it today did not exist in the ancient Mediterranean world. (p. 17)

Turning to the medieval era, Fredrickson distinguishes among anti-Judaism and antisemitism:  “Anti-Judaism became antisemitism whenever it turned into a consuming hatred that made getting rid of Jews seem preferable to trying to convert them, and antisemitism became racism when the belief took hold that Jews were intrinsically and organically evil rather than merely having false beliefs and wrong dispositions.” (p. 19)

It was in the 12th and 13th centuries—in the wake of the First Crusade (1096)—that massacres of Jews became more common across Europe.  Even then, Fredrickson observes, baptism was typically an alternative to death.  “That so many Jews chose to die was a testament to the strength of their faith and that of their executioners rather than a prelude to the Holocaust.” (p. 20)

The emerging racism of late medieval Europe wasn’t aimed solely at Jews and Muslims.  Fredrickson cites historian Robert Bartlett’s argument that as Catholic European powers expanded, “the prejudice and discrimination directed at the Irish on one side of Europe and certain Slavic peoples on the other foreshadowed the dichotomy between civilization and savagery that would characterize imperial expansion beyond the European continent“.  Some German laws banned intermarriage with Slavs and Anglo-Irish cities barred membership in guilds to those of “Irish blood or birth“. (p. 23)

Despite that, Fredrickson resists calling these behaviors racist:  “What was missing—and why I think such ethnic discrimination should not be labeled racist—was an ideology or worldview that would persuasively justify such practices.” (p. 24)  Even the increased demonization of Jews by Christians in the wake of the catastrophic Black Death epidemics of the 14th century does not rise, in Fredrickson’s view, to the level of racism.

To attempt a short formulation, we might say that 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.“

We might say that.

In fact, by the time one reaches that humbly framed concluding sentence of George M. Fredrickson’s aptly titled Racism: A Short History (only 170 pages, introduction, epilogue and appendix included), Fredrickson has demonstrated such a comprehensive knowledge of his topic and field that the reader is likely to agree with—or at least, give serious consideration to—almost anything he writes.

Based on Fredrickson’s lifetime of scholarly study on racism, Racism: A Short History provides an overview of 600 years of racism—starting in late medieval Europe as Portugese and Spanish explorers first encounter Africans on the Guinea coast and drive Jews out of the emerging Spanish nation-state, continuing with the 18th and 19th century emergence of modern, scientific racism in the wake of the Enlightenment, climaxing with the rise (and decline) of overtly racist regimes (i.e., the Jim Crow South, Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa)—that brings all of that history up to the dawn of the 21st century and lays its legacy squarely before us, its inheritors.

I’ll have more to say about the book, but here are some opening thoughts and observations (mostly from Fredrickson himself).<!–more–>

First, some attempts at definition.  Racism:

   
• “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”;

   

• “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”;

   

• “has a historical trajectory and is mainly, if not exclusively, a product of the West”;

   

• “originated in at least a prototypical form in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries rather than in the eighteenth or nineteenth (as is sometimes maintained) and was originally articulated in the idioms of religion more than in those of natural science”. (p.6)

Fredrickson says his conception of racism “has two components: difference and power“. (p. 9)  Racism divides a society on the basis of unalterable differences between two groups, with one group “rightfully” wielding dominant power over the other.  “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”. (p. 9)

Fredrickson’s definition includes both white supremacy and antisemitism as variant forms of racism; and he focuses on Western racism for several reasons:

“First…the virus of racism did not infect Europe itself prior to the period between the late medieval and early modern periods.  Hence we can study its emergence in a time and place for which we have a substantial historical record.  Second, the varieties of racism that developed in the West had greater impact on world history than any functional equivalent that we might detect in another era or part of the world.  Third, the logic of racism was fully worked out, elaborately implemented, and carried to its ultimate extremes in the West, while at the same time being identified, condemned, and resisted from within the same cultural tradition.” (p. 11)

As you can see, Racism: A Short History synthesizes vast amounts of human history and thinking.  In addition to laying out his current thinking about racism, Fredrickson engages deeply with the work and views of other historians and thinkers, generously pointing out interpretations that differ from his own and taking the time to explain how his own thinking has evolved over the course of a five decade career.

As Fredrickson notes at the end of his introduction, “investigations of antisemitism and white supremacy have, for the most part, gone their separate ways“. Thus, this book (published in 2002) is the first “extensive comparison of the historical development over the past six centuries of these two most prominent expressions of Western racism“. (p. 12)

More to come.

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com