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

world history (although they were nearly approximated in
some of the southern states of the United States), and the
book’s treatment of German antisemitism gives the reader
little reason to anticipate the full horror of what would
soon be happening to Jews in Germany. Despite the timebound
limitations of its vision, Barzun’s Race did set two
important precedents for most future historians of racism:
it presumed that the claims of the innate inferiority of one
“race” to another were false or at least unproven, and its
main concern was with the history of ideas rather than
with the social and political applications of prejudiced beliefs
and attitudes.
The outbreak of World War II brought German racial
ideology into sharper focus as the pernicious ideas of an
evil enemy. Even before the United States had entered the
war, the prominent cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict
gave the term “racism” popular currency in her book Race:
Science and Politics, originally published in 1940 but reissued
several times thereafter. The first chapter was entitled “Racism:
The ism of the Modern World,” and another, called “A
Natural History of Racism,” established some of the central
themes of later and more detailed histories of the subject.
Her main concern was to refute the scientific pretensions
of believers in racial inequality, but she also provided both
a historical account and a theoretical discussion of the relation
between racial and religious intolerance. When she
was functioning as a historian of ideas, she distinguished
sharply between religious and racial conceptions of difference.
After apparently limiting the concept of racism to
theories based on natural science that did not come to
prominence before the nineteenth century, she went on to
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