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

INTRODUCTION
endowed with national souls or Volksgeister, which, rather
than being inherited by any observable biological or genetic
process, are passed on from generation to generation
by some mysterious or even supernatural means, a kind of
recurring gift from God. The long-standing European belief
that children had the same “blood” as their parents was
more metaphor and myth than empirical science, but it
sanctioned a kind of genealogical determinism that could
turn racial when applied to entire ethnic groups. 3
Deterministic cultural particularism can do the work
of biological racism quite effectively, as we shall see in more
detail in later discussions of völkisch nationalism in Germany
and South Africa. Contemporary British sociologists
have identified and analyzed what they call “the new cultural
racism.” John Solomos and Les Back argue, for example,
that race is now “coded as culture,” that “the central
feature of these processes is that the qualities of social
groups are fixed, made natural, confined within a pseudobiologically
defined culturalism.” Racism is therefore “a
scavenger ideology, which gains its power from its ability
to pick out and utilize ideas and values from other sets of
ideas and beliefs in specific socio-historical contexts.” But
there are also “strong continuities in the articulation of the
images of the ‘other,’ as well as in the images which are
evident in the ways in which racist movements define the
boundaries of ‘race’ and ‘nation.’” 4 These continuities suggest
to me that there is a general history of racism, as well
as a history of particular racisms, but knowledge of specific
contexts is necessary to an understanding of the varying
forms and functions of the generic phenomenon with
which we are concerned.
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