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

moved from the common voters’ roll in the Cape Province.
26 The debate among whites was not over the necessity
for segregation but only on the details of its implementation.
Relatively liberal white intellectuals and academics
used the new cultural anthropology not to promote inclusion
of blacks, as Boas did in the United States, but rather
as a sophisticated defense of group separation, one that substituted
cultural integrity for racial purity as the aim of the
policy. 27 During the 1920s, working-class whites were given
a measure of security against black competition much
greater than that enjoyed by poor whites in the American
South after the abolition of slavery. The passage in 1924
and thereafter of new laws protecting “civilized labor” and
erecting “industrial color bars” pegged the wages of whites
at artificially high levels and gave them exclusive access to
skilled jobs and other kinds of desirable employment. In
1936 the South African parliament closed a glaring loophole
in the developing system of racial differentiation and separation
when, for the first time, it prohibited marriage between
whites and Africans.
World War I and its aftermath was of course a much
more shattering and demoralizing experience for Germans
than it was for white Americans and South Africans. The
fact that Germany agreed to humiliating and debilitating
peace terms without actually being invaded and conquered
made the outcome an exceedingly bitter pill for militarists
and nationalists. The legitimacy of the Weimar Republic
was in question from the moment of its establishment. The
insistence of the victors on the full payment of reparations,
leading in 1923 to the French occupation of the Ruhr and
the subsequent hyperinflation, further discredited the gov-
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