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

APPENDIX Racism in Historical Discourse
scribe some horrendous acts of brutality and injustice that
were clearly inspired by beliefs associated with the concept
of race—the vilification, lynching, and segregation of African
Americans in the South during the Jim Crow era; the
Nazis’ demonization and extermination of European
Jewry; and the noncitizenship and economic servitude of
South African blacks under apartheid.
These three clear-cut examples of racism in both theory
and practice draw our attention to the fact that two kinds
of people have been conspicuously victimized by this proclivity
to denigrate and abuse others because of their physical
characteristics, ancestry, and alleged spiritual deficiencies:
people of color (especially blacks) and Jews. In the main
body of this study I compare these two principal manifestations
of racism and probe the connections between them.
Insight into the genesis and context of this undertaking can
perhaps be enhanced by a review of how previous scholarship,
including my own, has dealt with racism as a historical
subject—what meanings have been given to it and what
lessons may be learned from this historiography about
where we might go from here. In light of the multiple current
meanings of the term, some historians and social scientists,
including myself, have been tempted at times to exclude
the word from our vocabularies. In the introduction
to an early book on “white supremacy” in the United States
and South Africa, “I concluded that racism is too ambiguous
and loaded a term to describe my subject effectively.” 1
In a recent essay, Loïc Wacquant, a prominent sociologist
of race, advocates “forsaking once and for all the inflammatory
and exceedingly ductile category of ‘racism’ save as
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