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

THREE Climax and Retreat
internationally acceptable conduct. The emergence of racism
as a central human rights issue during the course of the
century resulted mainly from the attention paid to these
regimes by people beyond their borders. Their rise and fall
were major events, not only in the history of these countries
themselves, but also in the history of the world. They
should not therefore be considered or compared in isolation
but only in the international contexts that first influenced
their emergence and then contributed to their demise.
The story of racism in the twentieth century is one
story with several subplots rather than merely a collection
of tales that share a common theme.
As has been suggested, modernization or “becoming
modern” was a precondition for the overtly racist regimes.
Traditional face-to-face hierarchies of an informal or “paternalist”
sort, such as those that were found in black-white
relations in the rural South and South Africa of the premodern
era, could not be sustained in the urban and industrial
environments of the twentieth century. The maintenance
of white supremacy now required rules and regulations to
prevent blacks from taking advantage of the absence of personalized
surveillance and thereby getting “out of their
place.” 9 Similarly, the premodern European pattern of communal
separation between Jews and gentiles, with contacts
limited primarily to economic transactions, did not suffice
to maintain an ethnic status order based on religion and
ancestry in a age of heavy industry, big cities, increased
social and economic mobility, and the consolidation of nation-states.
The norm of common citizenship and equal
rights in modern nation-states could turn strong prejudices
into systematic exclusions of a kind that could be justified
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