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

NOTES to Pages 41–55
46. The analogy to the Nazis is made by Netanyahu in Origins
and by Yerushalmi in Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism.
Both, however, give some weight to the difference between
religiously based and secular constructions of innate Jewish
difference.
47. Poliakov, History of Anti-Semitism, 2:230–231.
48. Quoted in Mörner, Race Mixture, 55–56.
49. See Thornton, Africa and Africans, 269–271.
50. See George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative
Study in American and South African History (New York,
1981), 73.
51. See references in nn. 24 and 43 above.
52. On the confusion surrounding the Curse of Ham in the
late medieval and early modern periods, see Benjamin Braude,
“The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical
Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” William
and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997): 103–142. On the uses of the curse to
justify radical status inequality within Europe, see Paul Freedman,
Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, 1999), 86–104.
53. Sanders, Lost Tribes, 62.
54. Benjamin Braude, “Race and Sex: What Happened to
Cross-Color Generation in the Eighteenth Century?” (paper presented
to the Conference on Sexuality in Early America, Philadelphia,
June 1–3, 2001), 17–18.
55. See Thomas Virgil Peterson, Ham and Japheth: The Mythic
World of Whites in the Antebellum South (Metuchen, N.J., 1978).
Blackburn, in New World Slavery (72–73), criticizes David Brion
Davis for contending that the Curse of Ham had little importance
as a justification of slavery before the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries (Slavery and Human Progress [New York, 1984], 337
n. 144). In my view the curse was not securely linked to the polemical
defense of slavery until it became an alternative rationale
for southerners who resisted scientific racism on fundamentalist religious
grounds.
56. I have described this transition elsewhere. See “Social Origins
of American Racism,” in The Arrogance of Race: Historical Per-
176