american-holocaust

ON RACISM AND GENOCIDE 275status criteria" and as sufficient documentation to establish that such asociety cannot correctly be labeled racist.It is by appealing to this definition that Fredrickson and others continueto assert that the existence of free blacks in seventeenth-century Virginia-andparticularly of someone like Anthony Johnson, who arrived inVirginia as a slave from Africa and somehow became a freeman, a landowner, and the owner of a slave-proves that seventeenth-century Virginiawas not a racist society, that racism only emerged in later years. 17 Again,not only can this criterion be used to argue that racism is not a seriousand tenacious problem today (since some blacks and other people of color,in theory at least, may escape its tentacles), but in addition it speciouslyserves to establish that even the deep South in the middle of the nineteenthcentury was not ideologically or "explicitly" racist. For if Anthony Johnson,with his small plot of land and single slave is a sufficient example toshow that seventeenth century Virginia was not racist, what are we tomake of William Ellison, a black former slave who lived in South Carolinafrom the 1790s until the outbreak of the Civil War, acquiring in that timea 900-acre plantation, more than sixty slaves, and more wealth than 95percent of the South's white men? And at least half a dozen other southernblacks at this time-among the more than 3600 African Americans whothen possessed over 12,000 slaves-were wealthier and owned more slavesthan Ellison. 18If ever a region in America could properly be described as racist, it wasthe deep South in the decades immediately preceding the Civil War. Thus,we are left with a choice between one of two conclusions: either the existenceof Ellison and other wealthy, slave-owning southern blacks at thistime proves that the deep South was not then a truly racist society, inwhich case, no locale in America, at any time, can ever have been categoricallyand "explicitly" racist; or the criteria used by Fredrickson and othersare inappropriate and ineffective for use in locating and defining a racistsociety. It should not be necessary to point out that only the latter choicemakes any sense at all.It might also be noted that the same criteria used to demonstrate thatthe seventeenth-century slave-holding colonies were not "genuinely" racistcan be used with equal veracity (which is to say none) to show that theGerman Nazi Party in the 1930s was not "genuinely" anti-Semitic, since alarge proportion of its membership, when surveyed, expressed no anti­Semitic attitudes. 19 None of this should be taken to mean, however, thata formalized and widely believed pseudoscientific theory of racial inequalityis not different from lower-level and more diffuse racist thinking. Theyare different, but they both are thoroughly racist.There is a certain paradoxical quality to the fact that while the rest ofinformed society has come to recognize the existence of subtler and more