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

THREE Climax and Retreat
some of their slaveholding ancestors, but in the story of
the destruction of the Tower of Babel. In their exegesis of
this tale, the religious apologists for apartheid identified a
God who regarded attempts to unify the human race as
manifestations of sinful pride. As a remedy to the evils of
universalism, he prescribed a strict division of humanity
into separate linguistic and cultural groups, which were
commanded, in effect, to keep their distance from each
other and to “develop along their own lines.” 61 If we were
to take these ideologues at their word, cultural relativism
rather than hierarchical racism would have to be acknowledged
as the essence of apartheid.
Their word, however, cannot obscure the extent to
which the practice of apartheid belied these principles and
reflected the unvarnished Herrenvolk ideology of J. G. Strydom,
who affirmed that it was his “color sense” that was
the key to the white man’s survival in South Africa. 62 Color
clearly trumped culture when it came to the differential
privileges that all “Europeans,” whatever their language
and ethnicity, enjoyed in contrast to all “nonwhites,” whose
unique linguistic or cultural characteristics did not prevent
them from being consigned to separate facilities for “nie
blankes.” The long struggle of Afrikaners for economic, social,
and cultural parity with the English was won relatively
easily once they had the full power of the state at their
disposal after 1948. Increasingly the “we” became all whites
and the “they” became all Africans or even all nonwhites.
The “Coloreds”—a substantial population group of
mixed origin that had developed in the Western Cape out
of the interaction of Europeans, East Asians, Khoikhoi
(“Hottentots”), and black Africans in the seventeenth and
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