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

a descriptive term referring to empirically analyzable doctrines
and beliefs about ‘race.’” 2
Most historians of race and racism have in fact limited
themselves to the study of racial doctrines and beliefs and
would therefore be permitted by Wacquant to continue
using the term. But it was in part the limitations of considering
racism simply as a doctrine or set of ideas that encouraged
me to substitute the term “white supremacy” to designate
the white-over-black manifestation of it. I wanted to
examine the relationship between the cultural aspects—
racist attitudes, beliefs, and ideas—and structures and politics
of racial domination. To put it another way, my interest
was not merely in the history of ideas and attitudes but in
the history of ideology in the broadest sense of that term.
What also concerned me, therefore, was the relationship
between attitudes and beliefs on the one hand and practices
and institutions on the other. But I would insist that certain
kinds of ideas and beliefs must be present, at some level of
consciousness, in the minds of the practitioners of racism.
If not, we would have no way to distinguish racism from
classism, ethnocentrism, sexism, religious intolerance, ageism,
or any other mode of allotting differential advantages
or prestige to categories of people that vary, or seem to
vary, in some important respect.
A further conceptual refinement can be derived from
Kwame Anthony Appiah’s distinction between racism and
“racialism.” He defines racialism as the belief “that there
are heritable characteristics, possessed by members of our
species, that allow us to divide them into a small set of
races, in such a way that all the members of these races
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