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

TWO The Rise of Modern Racism(s)
humanity was acknowledged. But the logical outcome of
the blood-based folk nationalism increasingly embraced by
the Germans was the total exclusion or elimination of Jews.
The implications of this difference would become apparent
only in the mid–twentieth century. If we take 1900 as our
vantage point, there is no question that the American color
line was much more rigid than the barriers between Jews
and gentiles in Germany. Perhaps future developments in
Germany were not inevitable. Without further crises, frustrations,
and ideological developments, Jewish assimilation
into a more tolerant and pluralist Germany might well have
occurred. Similarly, Americans might not have repudiated
their legalized racial caste system and embraced public
equality in the 1960s if it had not been for some domestic
and international political contingencies. Historical preconditions
do not usually become determinants unless there
are some intervening circumstances or contingencies. 79
Perhaps the most profound lesson to be drawn from
the comparison concerns the relation of racism to modernity
or modernization. Sources of resistance to capitalist
economic development and the individualistic values that
went with it were significantly weaker in the United States
than in Europe, and perhaps stronger in Germany than in
any other western European nation. 80 Jewish immigrants,
in the long run at least, adapted well to the American modernist
ethos and prospered within it. Blacks, on the other
hand, were associated in the white mind with the primitive,
the backward, or the irredeemably premodern. The heritage
of slavery and beliefs about the savagery of Africa engendered
a white supremacist myth that blacks were an
inherently unprogressive race, incapable of joining the
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