Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

TWO The Rise of Modern Racism(s)
changes as “progress” and supplemented them with democratic
reforms. Unable to accept socialism because of its
attack on private property and traditional values, but nevertheless
alienated or threatened by aspects of capitalist development,
many in the Mittelstand found irresistible the
temptation to blame the Jews for what had gone wrong.
Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century German
antisemitism differed most obviously from the American
white supremacism of the same period in the contrasting
ways that the targets of racist aggression were stereotyped.
Germans feared that, under modern competitive conditions,
which allegedly reward the clever and unscrupulous,
Jews might be their superiors. Discrimination was justified,
therefore, as a means of self-preservation. 72 Most white
Americans, on the other hand, believed that blacks were
innately incompetent in all ways that mattered. The danger
that they represented for extreme racists was the disease,
violent criminality, and sexual contamination that a large
population in the process of degenerating, or “reverting to
savagery,” could present to their white neighbors. 73
If the “they” were different in each case, so were the
“we.” Germans were not simply whites or Caucasians; they
were members of a superior branch of the Caucasian
race—the Aryans. The political purpose of the Aryan
myth (which had arisen from linguistic studies that traced
German and other Indo-European languages to ancient
Sanskrit) was to distinguish Germans and other northern
Europeans from Jews. Since ethnologists generally regarded
Semites as a branch of the Caucasian race, mere
“whiteness” would not do to designate the master race.
In the United States, despite occasional doubts about
90