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

APPENDIX Racism in Historical Discourse
encompass both the antisemitic and the color-coded varieties.
The first comprehensive history of American racism,
Thomas Gossett’s Race: The History of an Idea in America
(1963) traced consciousness of race to the ancient world. 31
Its treatment of specifically American manifestations cast
its net quite wide to include representation and treatment
of American Indians and immigrants from southern and
eastern Europe, including Jews, as well as blacks. But most
subsequent work on the history of American racism has
been group-specific and has concentrated most heavily on
attitudes toward African Americans. On the other hand,
George Mosse’s general history of European racism, published
in 1978, focused mainly on the growth of racist antisemitism
and paid relatively little attention to the colorcoded
racism associated with imperial expansion. 32 There
appear to be only two significant attempts to cover Western
attitudes toward race comprehensively: Ivan Hannaford’s
Race: The History of an Idea in the West (1996) 33 and Imanuel
Geiss, Geschichte der Rassismus (History of racism) published
in Germany in 1988 and never translated into English. 34
Hannaford’s study, as its title indicates, is strictly an intellectual
history and considers race as a concept more than racism
as an ideology. It argues strenuously that no clear concept
of race existed before the seventeenth century, thus
raising the issue of whether anything that existed before
the invention of race in the modern sense can legitimately
be labeled racism. Geiss, to the contrary, sees racism as
anticipated in most respects by the ethnocentrism or xenophobia
that developed in the ancient world, as reflected, for
example, in the Old Testament.
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