Author: MassCommons

(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...

(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...

(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...

(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...

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...