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

NOTES to Pages 93–109
78. For a theoretical understanding of this process, see Herbert
Blumer’s seminal essay “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group
Position,” Pacific Sociological Review 1 (1958): 3–7.
79. See chap. 3 below for a discussion of some of these contingencies.
80. This is the enduring truth that survives from the American
consensus historiography of the 1950s and from the school of
historians who stress German exceptionalism or ein Sonderweg.
The lesson should be that every nation’s history is exceptional, not
that one is peculiar in ways that make it stand out against some abstract
model of normality or typicality.
THREE Climax and Retreat
1. The adjective is necessary because the word “regime” can
be used to describe a prevailing system of domination the basis of
which is implicit or de facto rather than explicit and de jure. I was
tempted to use the concept of “the racial state,” as developed by
Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann in The Racial State:
Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), but their usage emphasized
some features of the Nazi regime’s practice of “racial hygiene”
that were not replicated in South Africa or the American
South. The Nazis were unique in the extent to which they tried to
improve the quality of the “master race” through the elimination
of its “unfit” members.
2. See John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The
Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge,
Eng., 1982). But in my view the preapartheid segregation
policy in South Africa did not meet the criteria for a racist regime
as fully as did the Jim Crow system in the American South. Unlike
Cell, I would make a typological distinction between colonialist
and racist regimes. It was not until after 1948 that South Africa
completed its evolution from the former to the latter. A work that
highlights the modern aspect of apartheid is Heribert Adam, Modernizing
Racial Domination: South Africa’s Political Dynamics (Berkeley,
1971).
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