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

caust: “Man is before he acts; nothing he does may change
what he is. This is roughly the philosophical essence of racism.”
But he then proceeds to limit the concept to cases
where the aim is the extermination or expatriation of the
racialized other. 6 Hence white supremacy, which normally
involves the domination rather than elimination of the
Other, ceases to be racism. When I myself defined the essence
of racism as the ideas, practices, and institutions associated
with a rigid form of ethnic hierarchy, I was unwittingly
privileging the white supremacist variant over the
antisemitic form, which presses toward the dissolution of
the hierarchy through the expulsion or destruction of the
lower-status group. 7
Although the historiographies of white supremacy and
antisemitism have not, for the most part, engaged each
other, a small number of scholars, going back to the 1920s,
have examined racism historically in a way that was not
group-specific—as a mode of thought or set of attitudes
with varying or multiple targets. Understanding which
groups were considered the primary victims and how the
racists whose ideas were being analyzed identified themselves
and the group to which they belonged may provide
a kind of lineage for my short history. But there is one
aspect of these studies that may trouble some advocates of
scholarly objectivity. Scholars who were hostile to what
they were writing about have produced virtually all such
examinations of racism. In many cases (especially at times
when racism was respectable) a central purpose of their
work was to discredit the ideas they were describing. While
this did not mean that they were producing propaganda
rather than scholarship, it did mean that they either argued
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