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

THREE Climax and Retreat
cultural and political height, and himself rising to be
its master. 32
This text reveals more about the deep sources of extreme
racism than almost any that could be found. The
lynch mobs of the American South often justified their
atrocities by alleging the rape or attempted rape of white
women by black men. The fear of sexual pollution or violation
by the allegedly subhuman race is close to the heart
of murderous or genocidal racism whenever and wherever
it appears. In the racist imagination, blacks have been
somewhat more likely than Jews to be viewed as violent
sexual predators. The myth of the oversized black penis
may be contrasted with the turn-of-the-century antisemitic
belief that the large Jewish nose signified a small penis, further
truncated by circumcision. Such images raised questions
about Jewish masculinity or virility. 33 But the villainous
eighteenth-century “Court Jew” in Viet Harlan’s 1940
film Jew Süss manages to rape a woman from a prominent
Christian family and is lynched as a result. 34 The notion of
the Jew as a cunning seducer, and occasionally a violent
rapist, was a staple of Nazi propaganda. In the passage
warning against “the black-haired Jewish youth” Hitler also
manages to arouse fears of black sexuality when he blames
the Jews for the introduction into the Rhineland of soldiers
from the French African colonies, some of whom had affairs
with German women that resulted in children of
mixed ancestry. A Negrophobic white supremacist as well
as a racist antisemite, the future Führer identified the principle
of racial equality being promulgated by Jews and Marxists
with “a bastardized and niggerized world” in which “all
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