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

Meanwhile many critical social-scientific studies of prejudice
and discrimination against blacks followed in the
wake of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma of 1944.
This epoch-making work brought to broad public notice
for the first time the fact that the foundation-supported social
science community, spurred by revulsion against racism
inspired by Hitler’s policies, had reached a consensus that
Jim Crow segregation was unjustified and indeed un-American.
29 The favored term in early works criticizing white
supremacy in the United States was “race prejudice” rather
than “racism.” Not until the 1960s did the latter term come
into general use to describe attitudes toward African Americans,
and then it was at first limited to the intellectual content
of the beliefs and not to the behavior with which it
was associated. But as popular usage of the term came to
encompass prejudice and discrimination as well as doctrine,
many historians concerned with black-white relations in
the United States began to use the term casually, without
reflecting much on its meaning. At its most imprecise, it
could mean anything that whites did or thought that
worked to the disadvantage of blacks. In the 1960s and
1970s intellectual and social historians produced a number
of major works on color-coded racism or white supremacy
as theory, belief system, or ideology. This work was inspired,
not only by the civil rights movement in the United
States, but also by the decolonization of Africa and a growing
awareness that there were race questions in the other
former slave societies of the Americas. 30
Since the bifurcation of studies of white supremacy and
antisemitism that took place after World War II, there have
been few serious efforts to write histories of racism that
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