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

APPENDIX Racism in Historical Discourse
only one type of racism—what I would now call the “colorcoded”
or somatic variety. A review of the historical discourse
on racism that began in the 1920s reveals that the
term was first applied to ideologies making invidious distinctions
among divisions of the “white” or Caucasian race,
and especially to show that Aryans or Nordics were superior
to other people normally considered “white” or “Caucasian.”
The term “race” has a long history, but “racism”
goes back only to the early twentieth century, and the “ism”
reflected the understanding of historians and others who
wrote about it that they were dealing with a questionable
set of beliefs and not undeniable facts of nature. It might
be said that the concept of racism emerges only when the
concept of race, or at least some of its applications, begin
to be questioned. Our understanding of the core function
of racism—its assigning of fixed or permanent differences
among human descent groups and using this attribution of
difference to justify their differential treatment—has
changed less during the past century than have the specific
categories of people who are viewed as its victims.
The historiographies of the two most conspicuous
manifestations of racism—white supremacism and antisemitism—have
proceeded along different tracks. Historians
and sociologists concerned with one kind of racism have
generally shown little interest in the work done on the
other. When racism has been a central concept in this
work, it has often been defined in such a group-specific way
that a wider application is made difficult, if not foreclosed
entirely. For example, one can readily agree with the British
sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s short definition of racism,
which precedes his discussion of how it applies to the Holo-
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