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

THREE Climax and Retreat
were coming under European or American hegemony. 11
Racial Darwinism meant, according to Paul Gordon
Lauren, that “nations and races progressed only through
fierce competition” and therefore “had no choice but to
participate in the struggle for the survival of the fittest.” 12
The climax of imperialism was driven as much, if not more,
by the status rivalry between Western nations as by a desire
for specific territories and the natural or human resources
that they contained. But the belief in the superiority of “civilized”
whites over “barbarous” or “savage” peoples was an
essential rationale.
We would be wise, however, to heed the warning of
Michael Adas against making racism the ideological essence
of imperialism. 13 Although some proponents of imperialism
believed that the colonized were subhuman and
therefore incapable of improvement beyond a kind of taming
or domestication, others affirmed their capacity to be
educated and civilized, although the process might take a
long time. The view of colonial rule as a lengthy and problematic
apprenticeship for civilized modernity can be
viewed as functionally racist to the degree that it justified
denying civil and political rights to indigenous populations
for the foreseeable future. But insofar as those relatively
few individuals who assimilated Western civilization could
actually gain such rights, the racist aspect was attenuated.
Colonial policies that allowed for a kind of emancipation
through assimilation, as the French in particular tended to
do, were highly ethnocentric, but not, strictly speaking, racist.
It was also the case that extreme racists could be antiimperialists
on the grounds that little or no good could
come out of close contact with the inferior breeds inhab-
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