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

century French theory that class differences could be attributed
to “racial” origins. (The aristocracy was allegedly descended
from the Germanic Franks and the “Third Estate”
from the Gauls.) Simar was ahead of his time in maintaining
that the concept of race, thus employed, lacked all
scientific validity and was devised for political purposes.
Most often, he contended, claims of racial superiority were
a pretext for an assertion of class interests. But he rarely
refers to white supremacist ideas. He includes “les blancs
tout court” among the self-identifications of the master
race promulgated by nineteenth-century German thinkers
and condemns the slaveholders of the Old South for believing
that blacks belonged to a different species than
whites, but nothing he wrote suggested that racism was
involved in the atrocities against Africans recently committed
by Belgians in the Congo. He reveals another limitation
of his vision when he criticizes Houston Stewart Chamberlain
for his beliefs in Germanic superiority without mentioning
Chamberlain’s principal obsession—antisemitism.
When he gets around to discussing racist attitudes toward
Jews, he dismisses antisemitic beliefs in a vast Jewish conspiracy
as exaggerated and even “bizarre,” but blames Jews
themselves, because of their traditionalism and exclusiveness,
for much of the feeling against them. Although Simar
apparently employed for the first time in a historical work
the terms “raciste” and “racisme,” what he found most
threatening about such views was their employment by
Germans against other Europeans of Christian heritage. 9
In a somewhat similar vein was Frank H. Hankins’s The
Racial Basis of Civilization, published in 1926, the first work
by an American that dealt in part with the history of what
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