Racism a short history george m fredrickson pdf

R A C I S M

PR IN CETON UNI VE RS I TY PRE SS PRI NC ETO N A ND OXF ORD

G E O R G E M. F R E D R I C K S O N

RACISM A Short

History

Copyright  2002 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fredrickson, George M., 1934– Racism : a short history / George M. Fredrickson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-00899-X (alk. paper) 1. Racism—History. 2. Race relations—History. I. Title. HT1507 .F74 2002 305.8′009—dc21 2001055191

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This book has been composed in Dante

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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C O N T E N T S

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S ix

I N T R O D U C T I O N 1

O N E Religion and the Invention of Racism 15

T W O The Rise of Modern Racism(s): White Supremacy and Antisemitism in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 49

T H R E E Climax and Retreat: Racism in the Twentieth Century 97

E P I L O G U E

Racism at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century 139

A P P E N D I X

The Concept of Racism in Historical Discourse 151

N O T E S 171

I N D E X 193

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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

In the course of carrying this project to fruition I haveacquired many debts. To Professor Constantin Fasolt ofthe University of Chicago I owe the original suggestion that I write a short book on racism in world historical per- spective. 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 Commit- tee and Professor Nancy Weiss Malkiel, Dean of the Fac- ulty, for inviting me to give the series of lectures on which this book is based. Brigitta van Rheinberg of Princeton Uni- versity 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 Ben- jamin Braude, Sean Dobson, John Cell, Norman Naimark, David Nirenberg, John Torpey, Eric Weitz, Howard Wi- nant, 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.

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R A C I S M

I N T R O D U C T I O N

The term “racism” is often used in a loose and unre-flective way to describe the hostile or negative feel-ings of one ethnic group or “people” toward an- other 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 su- premacists 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 twenti- eth century in the rise and fall of what I will call “overtly racist regimes.” In the American South, the passage of seg- regation laws and restrictions on black voting rights re- duced African Americans to lower-caste status, despite the constitutional amendments that had made them equal citi- zens. Extreme racist propaganda, which represented black males as ravening beasts lusting after white women, served

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to rationalize the practice of lynching. These extralegal exe- cutions were increasingly reserved for blacks accused of of- fenses 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 sim- ply 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 pre- vent 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 gen- tiles, and the propaganda surrounding the legislation em- phasized the sexual threat that predatory Jewish males pre- sented 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 Crow era. Individual blacks had been hanged or burned to death by the lynch mobs to serve as examples to ensure that the mass of southern African Americans would scrupulously respect the color line. But it took Hitler and the Nazis 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 un- dermining racist genetics (or eugenics), served to discredit the scientific racism that had been respectable and influen- tial in the United States and Europe before the Second

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World War. But explicit racism also came under devastating attack by 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, was a beneficiary of revul- sion against the Holocaust as the logical extreme of racism. But it also drew crucial support from the growing sense that national interests were threatened when blacks in the United States were mistreated and abused. In the competi- tion with the Soviet Union for “the hearts and minds” of independent Africans and Asians, Jim Crow and the ideol- ogy 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, which did not in fact come to fruition until the advent of apartheid in 1948. The laws passed banning all marriage and sexual relations between different “population groups” and requir- ing separate residential areas for people of mixed race (“Coloreds”), as well as for Africans, signified the same ob- session with “race purity” that characterized the other rac- ist regimes. However, the climate of world opinion in the wake of the Holocaust induced some apologists for apart- heid to avoid straightforward biological racism and to rest their case for “separate development” mainly on cultural rather than physical differences. The extent to which Afri- kaner nationalism was inspired by nineteenth-century Eu- ropean cultural nationalism also contributed to this avoid- ance of a pseudoscientific rationale. No better example can be found of how a “cultural essentialism” based on nation-

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ality can do the work of a racism based squarely on skin color or other physical characteristics. The South African government also tried to accommodate itself to the age of decolonization. It offered a dubious independence to the overcrowded “homelands,” from which African migrants went forth to work for limited periods in the mines and factories of the nine-tenths of the country reserved for a white minority that constituted less than a sixth of the total population.

The defeat of Nazi Germany, the desegregation of the American South in the 1960s, and the establishment of ma- jority 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 inequal- ity. Discrimination by institutions and individuals against those perceived as racially different can long persist and even flourish under the illusion of nonracism, as recent stu- dents of Brazilian race relations have discovered.1 The use of allegedly deep-seated cultural differences as a justifica- tion for hostility and discrimination against newcomers from the Third World in several European countries has led to allegations of a new “cultural racism.” Similarly, those sympathetic to the plight of poor African Americans and Latinos in the United States have described as “racist” the view of some whites that many denizens of the ghettos and barrios can be written off as incurably infected by cultural pathologies. From the historian’s perspective such recent examples of cultural determinism are not in fact unprece- dented. They rather represent a reversion to the way that

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the differences between ethnoracial groups could be made to seem indelible and unbridgeable before the articulation of a scientific or naturalistic conception of race in the eigh- teenth century.

The aim of this book is to present in a concise fashion the story of racism’s rise and decline (although not yet, unfortunately, its fall) from the Middle Ages to the present. To achieve this, I have tried to give racism a more precise definition than mere ethnocentric dislike and distrust of the Other. The word “racism” first came into common usage in the 1930s when a new word was required to describe the theories on which the Nazis based their persecution of the Jews. As is the case with many of the terms historians use, the phenomenon existed before the coinage of the word that we use to describe it. But our understanding of what beliefs and behaviors are to be considered “racist” has been unstable. Somewhere between the view that racism is a peculiar modern idea without much historical precedent and the notion that it is simply a manifestation of the an- cient phenomenon of tribalism or xenophobia may lie a working definition that covers more than scientific or bio- logical racism but less than the kind of group prejudice based on culture, religion, or simply a sense of family or kinship.2

It is when differences that might otherwise be consid- ered ethnocultural are regarded as innate, indelible, and un- changeable that a racist attitude or ideology can be said to exist. It finds its clearest expression when the kind of ethnic differences that are firmly rooted in language, customs, and kinship are overridden in the name of an imagined collec- tivity based on pigmentation, as in white supremacy, or on a

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

linguistically based myth of remote descent from a superior race, as in Aryanism. But racism as I conceive it 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. Racism, therefore, is more than theorizing about human differences or thinking badly of a group over which one has no control. It either 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. Racism in this sense is neither a given of human social existence, a universal “consciousness of kind,” nor simply a modern theory that biology determines history and culture. Like the modern scientific racism that is one expression of it, it has a histori- cal trajectory and is mainly, if not exclusively, a product of the West. But it 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.

Racism is therefore not merely “xenophobia”—a term invented by the ancient Greeks to describe a reflexive feel- ing of hostility to the stranger or Other. Xenophobia may be a starting point upon which racism can be constructed, but it is not the thing itself. For an understanding of the emergence of Western racism in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, a clear distinction between racism and religious intolerance is crucial. The religious bigot con- demns and persecutes others for what they believe, not for what they intrinsically are. I would not therefore consider the sincere missionary, who may despise the beliefs and

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habits of the object of his or her ministrations, to be a racist. If a heathen can be redeemed through baptism, or if an ethnic stranger can be assimilated into the tribe or the cul- ture in such a way that his or her origins cease to matter in any significant way, we are in the presence of an attitude that often creates conflict and misery, but not one that should be labeled racist. It might be useful to have another term, such as “culturalism,” to describe an inability or un- willingness to tolerate cultural differences, but if assimila- tion were genuinely on offer, I would withhold the “R” word. Even if a group—for example, Muslims in the Otto- man Empire or Christians in early medieval Europe—is privileged in the eyes of the secular and religious authori- ties, racism is not operative if members of stigmatized groups can voluntarily change their identities and advance to positions of prominence and prestige within the domi- nant group. Examples would include the medieval bishops who had converted from Judaism and the Ottoman gener- als who had been born Christian. (Of course mobility may also be impeded by barriers of “caste” or “estate” that dif- ferentiate on a basis other than membership in a collectivity that thinks of itself, or is thought of by others, to constitute a distinctive “people,” or “ethnos.”)

Admittedly, however, there is a substantial gray area between racism and “culturalism.” One has to distinguish among differing conceptions of culture. If we think of cul- ture as historically constructed, fluid, variable in time and space, and adaptable to changing circumstances, it is a con- cept antithetical to that of race. But culture can be reified and essentialized to the point where it becomes the func- tional equivalent of race. Peoples or ethnic groups can be

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

endowed with national souls or Volksgeister, which, rather than being inherited by any observable biological or ge- netic process, are passed on from generation to generation by some mysterious or even supernatural means, a kind of recurring gift from God. The long-standing European belief that children had the same “blood” as their parents was more metaphor and myth than empirical science, but it sanctioned a kind of genealogical determinism that could turn racial when applied to entire ethnic groups.3

Deterministic cultural particularism can do the work of biological racism quite effectively, as we shall see in more detail in later discussions of völkisch nationalism in Ger- many and South Africa. Contemporary British sociologists have identified and analyzed what they call “the new cul- tural racism.” John Solomos and Les Back argue, for exam- ple, that race is now “coded as culture,” that “the central feature of these processes is that the qualities of social groups are fixed, made natural, confined within a pseudo- biologically defined culturalism.” Racism is therefore “a scavenger ideology, which gains its power from its ability to pick out and utilize ideas and values from other sets of ideas and beliefs in specific socio-historical contexts.” But there are also “strong continuities in the articulation of the images of the ‘other,’ as well as in the images which are evident in the ways in which racist movements define the boundaries of ‘race’ and ‘nation.’”4 These continuities sug- gest to me that there is a general history of racism, as well as a history of particular racisms, but knowledge of specific contexts is necessary to an understanding of the varying forms and functions of the generic phenomenon with which we are concerned.

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My theory or conception of racism, therefore, has two components: difference and power. It originates from a mind- set that regards “them” as different from “us” in ways that are permanent and unbridgeable. This sense of difference provides a motive or rationale for using our power advan- tage to treat the ethnoracial Other in ways that we would regard as cruel or unjust if applied to members of our own group. The possible consequences of this nexus of attitude and action range from unofficial but pervasive social dis- crimination at one end of the spectrum to genocide at the other, with government-sanctioned segregation, colonial subjugation, exclusion, forced deportation (or “ethnic cleansing”), and enslavement among the other variations on the theme. In all manifestations of racism from the mild- est 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. Also rejected is any notion that individ- uals can obliterate ethnoracial difference by changing their identities.

The French sociologist Pierre-André Taguieff has dis- tinguished between two distinctive varieties or “logics” of racism—“le racisme d’exploitation” and “le racisme d’ex- termination.”5 One might also call the two possibilities the racism of inclusion and the racism of exclusion. Both are racist because the inclusionary variant permits incorpora- tion only on the basis of a rigid hierarchy justified by a belief in permanent, unbridgeable differences between the associated groups, while the exclusionary type goes further and finds no way at all that the groups can coexist in the same society. The former would obviously apply most

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readily to white supremacy and the latter to antisemitism. But historical reality is too messy to enable us to use these dichotomies consistently in a group-specific way. For long periods in European history, Jews were tolerated so long as they stayed in “their place” (the ghetto), whereas African Americans migrating to the northern states during the era of slavery and afterward often found themselves exposed to what the psychologist Joel Kovel has called “aversive rac- ism” to distinguish it from the “dominative” variety that he finds ascendant in the South.6 Antebellum “black laws” forbidding the immigration of free African Americans into several Midwestern states were conspicuous examples of aversive racism, as were the various schemes for colonizing blacks outside of the United States. Depending on the cir- cumstances of the dominant group, and what uses, if any, it has for the subalterns, the logic of racism can shift from inclusionary to exclusionary and vice versa.

My conception may at first seem too broad to have the historical specificity that I promised to give it. It is possible that relations among peoples before the late Middle Ages were sometimes characterized by the kind of hostility and exclusiveness that betokens racism. But it was more com- mon, if not universal, to assimilate strangers into the tribe or nation, if they were willing to be so incorporated. There might be non-Western forms of prejudice and ethnocen- trism that would be hard to exclude under the terms of my definition. The traditional belief of the Japanese that only people of their own stock can truly understand and appreci- ate their culture, with the resulting discrimination against Japanese-born Koreans, might be an example.7 Another might be the feudal-type hegemony exercised by the ethni-

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cally distinct Tutsi herdsmen over the Hutu agriculturalists in Rwanda and Burundi before colonization.8 But I will con- centrate on racism in Europe and its colonial extensions since the fifteenth century for several reasons. First, even if it has existed elsewhere in rudimentary form, the virus of racism did not infect Europe itself prior to the period be- tween 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.

What makes Western racism so autonomous and con- spicuous in world history has been that it developed in a context that presumed human equality of some kind. First came the doctrine that the Crucifixion offered grace to all willing to receive it and made all Christian believers equal before God. Later came the more revolutionary concept that all “men” are born free and equal and entitled to equal rights in society and government. If a culture holds a prem- ise of spiritual and temporal inequality, if a hierarchy exists that is unquestioned even by its lower-ranking members, as in the Indian caste system before the modern era, there is no incentive to deny the full humanity of underlings in order to treat them as impure or unworthy. If equality is the norm in the spiritual or temporal realms (or in both at the same time), and there are groups of people within the

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

society who are so despised or disparaged that the uphold- ers of the norms feel compelled to make them exceptions to the promise or realization of equality, they can be denied the prospect of equal status only if they allegedly possess some extraordinary deficiency that makes them less than fully human. It is uniquely in the West that we find the dialectical interaction between a premise of equality and an intense prejudice toward certain groups that would seem to be a precondition for the full flowering of racism as an ideology or worldview.

Writing an overview of the history of Western racism is possible because of the labors of many historians who have worked on particular aspects of the question. My en- deavor is inevitably an attempt at synthesis, although a por- tion of the scholarship I will be synthesizing is the product of my own original research. Readers interested in placing this work in a fuller scholarly (and autobiographical) con- text might at this point turn to the appendix, which traces the career of the concept of racism in historical discourse since the term (or its near equivalent) was first used in the 1920s. I pay particular attention there to how investigations of antisemitism and white supremacy have, for the most part, gone their separate ways. In the main body of the book I attempt an extensive comparison of the historical development over the past six centuries of these two most prominent expressions of Western racism. (To my knowl- edge no one has previously attempted such a study.) Chap- ter 1 deals with the segue between the religious intolerance of the Middle Ages and the nascent racism of the Age of Discovery and the Renaissance. Particular attention is paid in this chapter to Spain, the first great colonizing nation and

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a seedbed for Western attitudes toward race. The second chapter concerns the rise of modern racist ideologies, espe- cially white supremacy and antisemitism, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It concludes with a comparison of the rise—in response to “emancipation” as prospect or reality—of antiblack racism in the United States and racial antisemitism in Germany. The final chapter is mainly an examination in the context of world history of the rise and fall of the “overtly racist regimes” of the twentieth cen- tury—the American South in the Jim Crow era, Nazi Ger- many, and South Africa under apartheid. The epilogue speculates on the probable fate of racism in the new cen- tury that is upon us.

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O N E

Religion and the Invention of Racism

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It is the dominant view among scholars who have stud-ied conceptions of difference in the ancient world thatno concept truly equivalent to that of “race” can be detected in the thought of the Greeks, Romans, and early Christians. The Greeks distinguished between the civilized and the barbarous, but these categories do not seem to have been regarded as hereditary. One was civilized if one was fortunate enough to live in a city-state and participate in political life, barbarous if one lived rustically under some form of despotic rule.1 The Romans had slaves representing all the colors and nationalities found on the frontiers of their empire and citizens of corresponding diversity from among those who were free and proffered their allegiance to the republic or the emperor.2 After extensive research, the classical scholar Frank Snowden could find no evidence that dark skin color served as the basis of invidious distinc- tions anywhere in the ancient world. The early Christians, for example, celebrated the conversion of Africans as evi- dence for their faith in the spiritual equality of all human beings.3

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O N E Religion and Invention of Racism

It would of course be stretching a point to claim that there was no ethnic prejudice in antiquity. The refusal of dispersed Jews to accept the religious and cultural hege- mony of the gentile nations or empires within which they resided sometimes aroused hostility against them. But abandoning their ethnoreligious exceptionalism and wor- shiping the local divinities (or accepting Christianity once it had been established) was an option open to them that would have eliminated most of the Otherness that made them unpopular. Jews created a special problem for Chris- tians because of the latter’s belief that the New Testament superseded the Old, and that the refusal of Jews to recog- nize Christ as the Messiah was preventing the triumph of the gospel. Anti-Judaism was endemic to Christianity from the beginning, but since the founders of their religion were themselves Jews, it would have been difficult for early Christians to claim that there was something inherently de- fective about Jewish blood or ancestry. Nonetheless there was an undeniable tendency to consider the Jews who had not converted when Christ was among them as a corporate group that bore a direct responsibility for the Crucifixion. “For the organization of Christianity,” writes the French historian Léon Poliakov, “it was essential that the Jews be a criminally guilty people.”4 In Matthew 27:25 Jews who called for the death of Christ cry out after the deed has been done: “His blood be upon us and our Children.”

The notion that Jews were collectively and hereditarily responsible for the worst possible human crime—deicide— created a powerful incentive for persecution. If it had been believed that the curse fell on individual Jews in such a way that they could never be absolved of it, racism would be a

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proper term for the prejudice against them. But the doc- trine, as expounded by Saint Augustine and others, that the conversion of the Jews was a Christian duty and essential to the salvation of the world meant that the great heredi- tary sin was not an indelible and insurmountable source of difference. 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 antise- mitism became racism when the belief took hold that Jews were intrinsically and organically evil rather than merely having false beliefs and wrong dispositions.5

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the attitudes of European Christians toward Jews became more hostile in ways that laid a foundation for the racism that later devel- oped. Once welcomed as international merchants and trad- ers, Jews were increasingly forced by commercial competi- tion from Christian merchant guilds into the unpopular and putatively sinful occupation of lending money at interest. But in this period of intense religiosity, it was the spiritual threat Jews allegedly represented that inspired most of the violence against them. Massacres of Jews began at the time of the First Crusade in 1096. In a few communities, mobs, stirred up by the rhetoric associated with the campaign to redeem the Holy Land from Muslims, turned on local Jews. Later Crusades stimulated more such pogroms. The church and the civil authorities viewed Muslims as a political and military threat to Christendom, while Jews had seemed to them to be relatively harmless and even somewhat useful. The church valued the presence of dispersed and suffering Jews as witnesses to divine revelation, and rulers sometimes employed them as fiscal agents. Consequently the ruling