Philadelphia Inquirer, Sun. Jun. 23, 2002 Carlin Romano | A brisk, incisive survey of ignorance. Racism: Precise definitions and historical sweep By Carlin Romano Inquirer Columnist
Racism A Short History By George M. Fredrickson Princeton. 207 pp. $22.95 Like many terms rocketed into wide use by political pressures, racism sounds as if it always existed. In fact, writes historian George M. Fredrickson, codirector of Stanford University's Research Institute for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, the word "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." Racism, in short, comes with a history, and it is to scrutinize racism's history and reasoning that Fredrickson decided to write this brisk, intense, incisive probe of the concept and its implications. The result is the best, most erudite introduction to racism available. Fredrickson establishes his definition of racism at the outset, though his tightest formulation comes later: 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." That last criterion, "unalterable" differences, is crucial to Fredrickson's notion. In his introduction, he distinguishes racism from ancient xenophobia, a "reflexive feeling of hostility to the stranger or Other." Xenophobia permits strangers to escape outsider status through assimilation, as the Greeks allowed others to "become" Greek. Fredrickson also sets racism apart from religious intolerance: "The religious bigot condemns and persecutes others for what they believe, not for what they intrinsically are." Racist regimes thus seek to establish a "permanent group hierarchy" based on unbridgeable differences. A key Fredrickson aim in Racism is to return a precise meaning to his term, which he concedes has come to mean almost any animosity by one ethnic group toward another. And one method he uses is a comparison of two extreme forms of racism - white supremacy in America's Jim Crow era, and Nazi anti-Semitism. Before exploring those later topics, however, Fredrickson provides his book's most eye-opening section: a provocative historical overview of racism in Europe, full of blunt facts. He reports that scholarship has found "no evidence that dark skin color served as the basis of invidious distinctions anywhere in the ancient world." Neither did "color-coded, white-over-black" racism come with ancient roots. "In fact," Fredrickson notes, "there was a definite tendency toward Negrophilia in parts of northern and western Europe in the late Middle Ages... . the common presumption that dark pigmentation inspired instant revulsion on the part of light-skinned Europeans is, if not completely false, at least highly misleading." Rather, Fredrickson reports, Muslim slaveholders in Iberia bear the blame for first imparting to Christian Europeans the notion that blacks were inferior to whites and properly suited to slavery - making the conversion in modern times of many blacks to Islam a strange historical irony. Similarly, ancient animosity toward Jews, Fredrickson states, is often misunderstood. "Anti-Judaism was endemic to Christianity from the beginning," he writes, while adding that since Christianity's founders "were themselves Jews, it would have been difficult for early Christians to claim that there was something inherently defective about Jewish blood or ancestry." On the contrary, St. Augustine and other early church fathers held "conversion of the Jews" to be "a Christian duty." That meant "the great hereditary sin" was not indelible difference: "Anti-Judaism became anti-Semitism whenever it turned into a consuming hatred that made getting rid of Jews seem preferable to trying to convert them, and anti-Semitism became racism when the belief took hold that Jews were intrinsically and organically evil rather than merely having false beliefs... . " As Fredrickson describes these patterns, he studs his texts with enough oddities of racism's history to raise readers' eyebrows and send eyes rolling. Did you know that a longstanding folk justification for holding blacks inferior was the "Curse of Ham," based on "a mysterious passage" in Genesis? "Ham drew the wrath of God because he viewed his father, Noah, in a naked and apparently inebriated state and mocked him. For this transgression, his son Canaan and all Canaan's descendants were condemned to be 'servants unto servants.'... But among medieval Arabs importing slaves from East Africa to the Middle East, the emphasis shifted from Canaan to Ham, widely believed to be the ancestor of all Africans, and the physical result of the curse became a blackening of the skin." Fredrickson points out that the curse, "like the literal demonization of the Jews, operated on the level of popular belief and mythology rather than as formal ideology," and actually contradicted church policy that favored converting Jews and blacks. Racism abounds with material like that. Racial environmentalists in early America "fully expected imported Africans to turn white in the more temperate climate to which they were now exposed." Our notion of "Caucasians" comes from a 1776 treatise by Johann Blumenbach, who believed the white race emerged from the Caucasus and possessed "beautiful" skulls. As you exit Fredrickson's house of horrors, the cultural illiteracy with which most of us use racism becomes clear. Fredrickson, hardly the rose-colored-glasses type, doesn't claim that truth about racism will set us free. Still, one expects many readers will emerge from his book embarrassed by the ignorance at racism's core, and far less susceptible to its lure. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
