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

THREE Climax and Retreat
occupied a highly advantaged position at the expense of
indigenous populations in all of the European colonies in
Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. But effective domination and
a modicum of respect for the professed ideal of a “civilizing
mission” normally required exceptions to the color line for
native elites that had either assimilated the culture of the
colonizing power (as in French and Portuguese possessions)
or were allowed to maintain a measure of their precolonial
authority under the systems of indirect rule favored especially
by the British. 4 It appears that the only early-twentieth-century
imperial power that officially banned intermarriage
between colonists and nonwhites, including those of
mixed blood, was Germany (a fact that will prove relevant
to our subsequent discussion of the origins of Nazi racism).
Latin American societies with significant black or Indian
populations discriminated informally against those
who were not white or European (i.e., branco, blanco, or
ladino), but did not pass Jim Crow laws or ban intermarriages,
which occurred with relative frequency. In such societies,
ideologies sanctioning or even glorifying race mixture
could in fact serve as an apparently nonracist facade for
the persistence of great social and economic disparities that
correlated roughly with differences in phenotype. 5 Despite
all the de facto discrimination and negative stereotyping
that prevailed in the northern United States between Reconstruction
and the 1950s, it did not have an overtly racist
regime. Many states tolerated intermarriage, and public
facilities remained, insofar as the law was concerned, unsegregated.
The historian George Reid Andrews contrasted
the unofficial racism of the American North and Brazil with
the “crudeness and visibility” of white supremacy in the
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