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

nationalistic ressentiment gave to the effort an emotional
edge that made extreme measures more likely.
The fact that international wars had a decisive effect on
the development of radical antisemitism in Germany and
white supremacism in South Africa reveals how the course
of world history in the twentieth century could bring race
to the forefront of consciousness and encourage the construction
of regimes that were officially and unequivocally
racist. One cannot fully explain the emergence of these regimes
by isolating the “independent variables” that distinguish
them from “racialized societies.” To be genuinely historical,
one must also take into account the concrete and
sometimes contingent ways in which the geopolitical history
of the twentieth century impinged upon race relations
in the United States, Germany, and South Africa.
The Western imperialism that began in the late fifteenth
century climaxed in late nineteenth with “the scramble
for Africa” and the seizure of new possessions or territorial
concessions in East Asia and the Pacific. The ideology
justifying the acquisition of new colonial territories by
France, Britain, Germany, and ultimately the United States
was transparently racist. Rudyard Kipling summed up this
ideology in the poem “The White Man’s Burden,” which
he wrote in 1899, in the wake of the Spanish-American War,
to encourage the victorious Americans to establish colonial
rule over the Philippines. The duty of the superior race,
according to Kipling, was to take responsibility for “newcaught,
sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child.” His trope
artfully combined a Darwinian emphasis on the competitive
fitness of the white man with the suggestion of a pseudopaternalistic
mission to uplift or improve the natives who
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