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”;

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  • “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”;

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

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  • “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