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

as what happens when ethnicity is deemed essential or indelible
and made hierarchical. 5 There are, however, cases—
and African American ethnicity would be a prime example—in
which ethnic identity is created by the racialization
of people who would not otherwise have shared an identity.
(Blacks did not think of themselves as blacks, Negroes, or
even Africans when they lived in the various kingdoms and
tribal communities of West Africa before the advent of the
slave trade.) From this perspective, racism is the evil twin of
ethnocentrism. The latter may involve racialism in Appiah’s
sense but can also be based on individual cultural identities
that are not viewed as unchangeable. (Many premodern
communities—American Indian tribes, for example—have
regarded themselves as superior beings and their enemies
as utterly unworthy of respect but have nevertheless readily
assimilated captives and other strangers regardless of phenotype
or cultural background.) The erroneous but relatively
harmless doctrine of simple racialism is rarely found
among members of the advantaged or dominant groups in
a plural society, but racism is all too common. One is more
likely to find tolerant or egalitarian racialism among stigmatized
groups: they may embrace and reevaluate some of
the differences traditionally attributed to them, attempting
to change them from defects into virtues, thus affirming a
positive cultural identity and making the case that difference
does not mean inferiority.
The reason that my efforts to dispense with the problematic
term “racism” in some of my earlier work came to
naught was simply because I could not find a satisfactory
alternative to describe the phenomena that I wished to
study. “White supremacy” is limited in its application to
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