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

TWO The Rise of Modern Racism(s)
cording to Victor Courtet de l’Isle, the races could be measured
through an assessment of how close the faces of each
type approximated the Greek statues of Apollo. There was,
however, something theoretical and unworldly about the
French discussions of black ugliness and stupidity. At times
members of the society advocated, in all seriousness, the
crossbreeding of colonial whites and blacks as a way of improving
the latter. Mulattoes, it was asserted, were scarcely
if at all inferior to whites. Nothing could have been more
remote from the phobias that characterized North American
attitudes toward the prospect of intermarriage with
people of African ancestry. 32
The fact that pre-Darwinian scientific racism flowered
in France and the United States more than in England may
derive to some extent, paradoxical as it may seem, from
the revolutionary legacies of nation-states premised on the
equal rights of all citizens. Egalitarian norms required special
reasons for exclusion. Simply being a member of the
lower orders would not suffice. Civic nationalist ideology
(operative by virtue of the egalitarian Code Napoléon even
when France was having one of its nineteenth-century imperial
or monarchical episodes) hindered legal and political
acknowledgment of the hierarchy of classes and orders that
slowed the emergence of mass democracy in Great Britain.
The one exclusionary principle that could be readily accepted
by civic nationalists was biological unfitness for full
citizenship. The precedent of excluding women, children,
and the insane from the electorate and denying them equality
under the law could be applied to racial groups deemed
by science to be incompetent to exercise the rights and privileges
of democratic citizenship. In France, the question
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