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

only if the excluded were regarded as less than fully human
or, at best, as inherently immature and thus incapable of
assuming the responsibilities of adulthood.
But since most modern or modernizing societies did
not develop overtly racist regimes, we are left with the
question of why the American South, South Africa, and
Germany did so. Ethnoracial demography is part of the
answer, but only a part. Relatively homogeneous societies
without a long history of ethnic hierarchy and division
would of course be relatively unlikely to develop racist regimes.
(The desire to remain ethnically or phenotypically
homogeneous, as reflected in immigration restrictions or
exclusions, could involve racist beliefs, as was the case, for
example, in the “White Australia” policy. But to the extent
that unwelcome aliens were effectively kept out, domestic
applications of these beliefs were not required.) Sheer numbers
alone did not produce explicit racism. Brazil has always
had a larger proportion of people of African descent than
has the United States (or even its southern region), and
Poland and Hungary in the 1930s had a much larger percentage
of Jews in their population than did Germany. Yet
it was Germany and a section of the United States that
generated overtly racist regimes. In South Africa, where
Europeans were a minority, numbers played a greater role,
but whites of relatively pure Spanish descent, as opposed
to mestizos and Indians, have long maintained their position
as a dominant minority in Mexico and Peru without resorting
to official racism to do so. The persistent strength
of the prejudices and stereotypes deriving from earlier relationships—the
fruits of centuries of slavery, frontier conflict,
intense religious bigotry, or bitter commercial rival-
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