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

the full claim to “whiteness” of various southern and eastern
European immigrants, “Caucasian” was the designation
that mattered in the end and served to distinguish all
those of European descent from blacks, Asians, and native
Americans. 74
Although still generally valid, this contrast requires
some qualification to take account of recent scholarship on
the period between the 1880s and the 1920s. During those
years, the ideology that political scientist Rogers M. Smith
calls “ascriptive Americanism” presented an especially
strong challenge to the competing ideology of Enlightenment
universalism. It did so by making exclusionary distinctions
among European “races,” as well as between Europeans
in general and Africans and Asians. Nativists seeking
to restrict immigration from eastern and southern Europe
stressed an association between a capacity for self-government
and Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-American, or Nordic (not
simply white or European) ancestry. Hence the United
States was not immune from its own variety of ethnic nationalism.
75 But what the right kind of people inherited
from their ancestors was the capacity to be liberal or democratic
in the manner prescribed by the Enlightenment and
the founding fathers. In Germany, völkisch nationalism was
explicitly promoted as antithetical to liberalism and the
heritage of the Enlightenment, and it had relatively weak
opposition from those who sought to make the national
project a prototype for humanity as a whole or even a large
segment of it.
At the turn of the century, American white supremacist
ideology was based on an interpretation (or distortion) of
the Enlightenment philosophy on which the nation was
91