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

tributes significantly to social stratification? First, there is an
official ideology that is explicitly racist. Those in authority
proclaim insistently that the differences between the dominant
group and the one that is being subordinated or eliminated
are permanent and unbridgeable. Dissent from this
ideology is dangerous and is likely to bring legal or extralegal
reprisals, for racial egalitarianism is heresy in an overtly
racist regime. Second, this sense of radical difference and
alienation is most clearly and dramatically expressed in laws
forbidding interracial marriage. The ideal is “race purity,”
and the bans on miscegenation reflect the maintenance or
creation of a caste system based on the presumed racial
differences. Third, social segregation is mandated by law
and not merely the product of custom or private acts of
discrimination that are tolerated by the state. The object is
to bar all forms of contact that might imply equality between
the segregators and the segregated. Fourth, to the
extent that the polity is formally democratic, outgroup
members are excluded from holding public office or even
exercising the franchise. Fifth, the access that they have to
resources and economic opportunities is so limited that
most of those in the stigmatized category are either kept
in poverty or deliberately impoverished. This ideal type of
an “overtly racist regime” applies quite well to the American
South in the heyday of Jim Crow, to South Africa under
apartheid, and to Nazi Germany. Nowhere else were the
political and legal potentialities of racism so fully realized.
Many other societies have had a significant racist dimension,
and some could be accurately described as “racialized
societies,” but they would nevertheless fall short of
meeting the criteria for an overtly racist regime. Whites
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