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

midst of them,” he wrote, “he has generally lagged behind
the level of such cultures.” Negro backwardness is the product
of biological factors, especially brain size, and therefore
cannot be “explained by lack of opportunity.” 13
Hankins, the professed critic of European “racialism,”
thus stood on the enduring bedrock of American racism—
the belief that Americans of European or white ancestry
are collectively superior in intelligence and creativity to
people of African descent. His single heresy, from this white
supremacist perspective, was his general approval of race
mixture, including intermarriage between blacks and
whites. Mulattoes, he thought, had a good chance to adapt
to “advanced culture,” and if they were light enough to pass
for white, so much the better. His biological racism was
therefore more logical (some would say more Brazilian) in
its application than the conventional American “one-drop
rule.” 14 In his references to Jews, Hankins showed little or
no awareness of the dangers of a politicized antisemitism,
although he did heap ridicule on some myths about Jews,
such as Houston Chamberlain’s fantasy that Jesus was really
an Aryan. Denying that Jews were “a race in any strict
sense,” he described them as “a social group which in many
times and places has been more vigorously hated than the
negro [sic] in many parts of the United States during the
last half century. The Jew has not only fought his own battle
but he has ‘come back’ with almost obnoxious persistency
and ‘nerve’ after every rebuff.” 15 Hankins thus managed to
put down blacks for their failure to rebound as Jews did,
while at the same time, in his use of the adjective “obnoxious,”
revealing a touch of the genteel Anglo-American
antisemitism that was rife in the 1920s.
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