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

modern world as efficient and productive people. If the relative
weakness of antimodernism in the United States promoted
the toleration of Jews, it had the effect of exacerbating
the disdain for blacks. The relation of the two groups
to America’s commitment to the modern seems to me a
better explanation for the relative weakness of American
antisemitism than the conventional theory that Jews were
not needed as universal scapegoats because blacks already
performed that function.
In Germany, where modernization was uneven, disruptive,
and sharply contested, it was the traditionalist or reactionary
resistance to aspects of capitalist-inspired economic
and social development and, above all, to the political liberalism
with which it was associated in other nations that led
to Jews’ being made the symbols and putative agents of
frightening or unwanted change. If African Americans were
not modern enough, German Jews were too modern. The
penalties that had to be paid for serving as the antitheses
of prevailing conceptions of national character were exceedingly
high in both cases.
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