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

TWO The Rise of Modern Racism(s)
Until the American, French, and Haitian revolutions,
most Jews remained in ghettos and most blacks were on
slave plantations, which meant that a “race question” did
not emerge with great urgency. Strong incentives to elaborate
a systematic racist ideology for the purpose of maintaining
domination or inciting persecution did not yet exist.
In the English-speaking world, an evangelical revival that
reemphasized the spirituality of human beings and their
equality under God countered the tendency to deny the
humanity of non-Europeans and Jews. 25 The secular Enlightenment,
on the other hand, was a double-edged sword.
Its naturalism made a color-coded racism seemingly based
on science thinkable and thus set the stage for nineteenthcentury
biological determinism. But at the same time, it
established in the minds of some a premise of equality in
this world rather than merely in heaven or under God, an
assumption that could call into question the justice and rationality
of black slavery and Jewish ghettoization. The Enlightenment
thus managed to give new salience and potency
to the concept of race while at the same time making
it possible to question whether its use as a basis for social
ranking and privilege was just and reasonable.
The age of democratic revolution that dawned in the
last quarter of the eighteenth century brought serious challenges
both to the institution of black slavery and to the
legalized pariah status of European Jews. The doctrine that
“all men are created equal” and endowed with individual
rights derived from nature or reason was difficult to reconcile
with lifetime servitude and forced ghettoization, unless
blacks and Jews were to be considered less than human. In
the wake of the struggle for independence from England,
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