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

THREE Climax and Retreat
ries—would have to be a significant part of the explanation.
Negative feeling about blacks or Jews in the preindustrial
era were undoubtedly stronger and more salient in the
countries or regions that constructed overtly racist regimes
than in those that did not.
Another common factor of varying significance in the
three cases was the extent to which the racial Other came
to be identified with national defeat and humiliation. African
Americans, most of them newly freed slaves, gave an
essential boost to the northern cause in the Civil War when
more than 200,000 of them enlisted in the armed forces of
the Union. They were thus complicit in thwarting southern
hopes for independent nationhood. Adding insult to injury
in the minds of ex-Confederates was the way black votes
sustained the rule of Radical Republicans during Reconstruction.
After 1918, as we shall see, Adolph Hitler and
other German antisemites blamed defeat in the First World
War on the machinations of international Jewry and the
alleged disloyalty of German Jews. In the South African War
of 1899–1902, Africans generally supported the British side
against the Afrikaner republicans and were thereafter seen
as inveterate enemies of Afrikaner self-determination. 10 In
all these cases, the actual perpetrators of defeat and humiliation—the
American North, the Allies in World War I, and
Great Britain—were too powerful to be within the reach
of reprisal, at least in the short run. Scapegoating the available
and vulnerable Other was one way of dealing with
the bitterness and frustration resulting from the failure of
nationalist projects. The impulse to adjust preexisting systems
of racial hierarchy to modern circumstances would
have existed in any case, but the association of racism with
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