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

THREE Climax and Retreat
regimes have been overthrown, and the ideologies on
which they were based have apparently been discredited.
But a final issue that will have to be confronted in the epilogue
is whether their demise also means that the virus of
racism has been exterminated or that it has merely mutated
into new and still-virulent forms.
As we have seen, something that can be legitimately
described as racism existed well before the twentieth or
even the late nineteenth century. Prejudice and discrimination,
fortified by ideologies claiming that the differences
between human groups of apparently divergent ancestry
are immutable and have implications for social inclusion or
ranking, have a history that goes back to the late Middle
Ages. But racist principles were not fully codified into laws
effectively enforced by the state or made a central concern
of public policy until the emergence of what I will call
“overtly racist regimes” during the past century. 1 John Cell’s
conception of American and South African segregation as
the “highest stage of white supremacy” draws attention to
the relation between modernization and legalized racism. 2
When the unequal treatment of people based on their race
is bureaucratized and “rationalized” in the Weberian sense,
one can say that racism has been modernized. The most
deadly outcome of a racist regime—the Holocaust—required
more than antisemitic ideology and sentiment. It
was thoroughly dependent, as Zygmunt Bauman has emphasized,
on modern bureaucratic methods and advanced
technology. 3
What are the distinguishing features of an overtly racist
regime that would distinguish it from the general run of
ethnically pluralistic societies in which racial prejudice con-
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