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

was theoretical because there were no significant racial minorities.
But in the United States, a true “Herrenvolk democracy”
emerged during the Jacksonian period, when the
right to vote was extended to all white males and denied
to virtually all blacks, including some who had previously
voted under a franchise restricted to property holders. 33
Napoleon’s discriminatory laws of 1808 were only a
temporary setback for French Jews on the path to equal
citizenship. But in the German lands invaded and occupied
by Napoleon, the reaction against everything that the
French Revolution stood for encouraged an exceptionally
hostile attitude toward Jews, not least because one of the
egalitarian reforms forced by Napoleon on defeated or
compliant German principalities was Jewish emancipation.
During the course of the nineteenth century, the Germans,
more than any other western Europeans, repudiated the
civic nationalist ideal inspired by the Enlightenment and
the eighteenth-century revolutions in favor of a concept of
national membership based predominantly on ethnic origins
rather than human rights. Defining themselves culturally
and linguistically rather than in terms of territorially
based rights of citizenship originally served as compensation
for the failure of the German-speaking peoples to unify
politically and become a single nation-state. 34 The civic
form of nationalism, in which citizenship is allegedly based
on universal human rights rather than ethnic particularities,
can become extremely oppressive or exclusionary if some
segment of the population is viewed as less than fully
human. If, however, biological racism can be refuted or
discredited, a polity inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment
could become a racially inclusive democracy. Where
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