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

The closest American analogue to this highly qualified
and increasingly tenuous assimilationism might be found
in the characteristic attitude of late-nineteenth-century reformers,
missionaries, and government officials toward
American Indians. The belief that Indians, unlike blacks,
were capable of being civilized, but only under conditions
that they were likely to resist, gave way around the turn of
the century to a conviction that Indian resistance to white
ways was genetically programmed and could not be overcome
by education and indoctrination. 39
The United States had its own variant of romantic nationalism
in the early to mid–nineteenth century. There
was no Jewish question, partly because there were relatively
few Jews in the country, but principally because religious
toleration and the separation of church and state barred
official discrimination on the grounds of faith. The status
of blacks as slaves and pariahs highlighted the advantages of
a white racial identity but conveyed little sense of America’s
cultural or ethnic specificity. If the Germans endowed
themselves with a “racial” identity and then excluded others
from it, Americans tended to racialize others and consider
themselves simply human—citizens of the “Universal
Yankee Nation” and beneficiaries of what was promised to
“all men” by the Declaration of Independence.
But during the 1840s the arrival of vast numbers of Irish
immigrants and the war with Mexico under the banner of
Manifest Destiny created a desire for finer distinctions. The
Irish were at least legally white, and so were the “Spanish”
inhabitants of the parts of Mexico coveted and eventually
acquired by the United States. In this context, as Reginald
Horsman has shown, the belief took hold that Americans
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