american-holocaust

276 APPENDIX IIcomplex forms of racism-such as "institutional" racism (or Joel Kovel'smore psychologically grounded "metaracism") as forms of oppression thatclearly are racist but do not depend for their existence on an openly articulatedand formal racial theory-many of the historians who have in recentyears devoted their professional lives to studying the phenomenonhave seemed determined to define racism almost out of existence. 20 Indeed,confusion on racism as a historical phenomenon has grown to the pointthat Jane Tompkins, the author of an article in a journal of avant-gardescholarly repute, has gone so far as to make the fanciful assertion-directlycontra Fredrickson, but equally illogical-that racism could not have existedin early American colonial society because white people at that timewere unanimous in their racist opinions! In short, according to Tompkins(who, like Fredrickson, is not alone in her conviction), unanimity of opinionis indication of a cultural norm, of people simply "look[ing) at othercultures in the way their own culture had taught them to see one another."21 Thus, on the one hand we have Fredrickson arguing that only ifevery member of an oppressed racial group in a society is oppressed forexplicitly racial reasons can that society be characterized as racist-and onthe other hand there is Tompkins contending that if there is unanimity ofracist opinion among the oppressor group in a society, that society, bydefinition, is non-racist.This is the sort of thing that gives professors a bad name. And, althoughthus far we have been looking largely at writings on early whiteAmerican attitudes toward African Americans (the exception is Tompkins),the very same lines of argument have been and continue to be playedout regarding sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Euro-American attitudestoward Indians. During the 1960s it had been customary for scholars, suchas Alden T. Vaughan, who were studying Indian-white conflict in theAmerican colonies, to assert that even during the ferocious exterminationcampaigns of the English against the native peoples of Virginia as well asagainst the Pequots and Narragansetts and Wampanoags of New England,the behavior of the British was not "determined by any fundamental distinctionof race," nor by "deep-seated bias" of any kind. 22 In White OverBlack, Jordan inadvertently had provided further fuel for this argument,by comparing blatant assertions of racial antipathy of the English for Africanswith what he viewed as their more benign attitude toward Indianracial characteristics. His perspective was then used to underpin uninformedclaims by later historians that whites did not harbor racist attitudestoward Indians even centuries after their first proudly proclaimedattempts to exterminate them. 23In their denial of racial motivation as part of the driving force behindthe colonists' efforts to eradicate the Indians, most of these historians'writings also were unblushing apologies for the genocide that had takenplace. Thus, Vaughan, for example, dismissed mass murder as "some mis-