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

THREE Climax and Retreat
quickly became known as “native segregation.” Initially the
maintenance of a territorial separation between indigenous
and settler populations could be presented as more beneficial
to the former than to the latter. Settlers, both Afrikaners
in the former Boer republics and the English colonists in
Natal, were opposed to establishing large “native reserves,”
because they feared that this would interfere with their access
to black labor. For the imperialists, territorial segregation
represented a humane and socially stabilizing alternative
to direct domination, or what Afrikaners called baaskap
(literally, mastership). By ceding full control of “native policy”
to a white settler minority in 1910, however, the British
imperial authorities sacrificed the interest of Africans and
made it inevitable that segregation would mean separate
and unequal—a facade for increasingly severe forms of domination
and exploitation. In this case, one can see an imperialist
form of race domination evolving into an overtly racist
regime, a process that would not be complete until the
implementation of apartheid after 1948. 16
The relationship of Jim Crow segregation in the American
South to the highest stage of Western imperialism was
less direct but nevertheless significant. As C. Vann Woodward
first pointed out, America’s embrace of “the white
man’s burden” in the Philippines and elsewhere around the
turn of the century helped to disarm what remained of
northern resistance to southern treatment of blacks as racial
inferiors. 17 In the South, however, blacks were the victims
of such hate-filled brutality in the early years of the
twentieth century that even a visiting South African segregationist
could find it appalling. 18 In the era of what Joel
Williamson has called “radical racism,” white southerners
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