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

in their veins was superior to that of people descended from
Jews, or because the color of their skin made them the
natural masters of Africans. And they could find passages
of the Bible that seemed to confirm their prejudices. But to
achieve its full potential as an ideology, racism had to be
emancipated from Christian universalism. To become the
ideological basis of a social order, it also had to be clearly
disassociated from traditionalist conceptions of social hierarchy.
In a society in which inequality based on birth was
the norm for everyone from king down to peasant, ethnic
slavery and ghettoization were special cases of a general
pattern—very special in some ways—but still not radical
exceptions to the hierarchical premise. Paradoxical as it
may seem, the rejection of hierarchy as the governing principle
of social and political organization, and its replacement
by the aspiration for equality in this world as well as
in the eyes of God, had to occur before racism could come
to full flower.
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