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

particularism that was explicitly anti-Enlightenment and
antimodern, one that affirmed traditional divisions of estate
or class among the dominant group but left no place
for Jews as Jews. Nevertheless, a consistently naturalistic or
biological racism was not applied to Jews in Germany until
well after it had been invoked to rationalize white American
attitudes toward blacks. Surviving until the end of the
century and beyond was the older tradition of antisemitism,
which stressed cultural differences and, at least in
theory, made conversion to Christianity (or at least the renunciation
of a Jewish identity) the miraculous cure for pariah
status.
Racism is always nationally specific. It invariably becomes
enmeshed with searches for national identity and
cohesion that vary with the historical experience of each
country. It is therefore expedient to narrow the focus to the
United States and Germany in the period between the mid–
nineteenth century and the early twentieth and attempt a
bilateral comparison of the nexus between emancipations—of
blacks in one case and Jews in the other—and the
crystallization of racist thought and action. To achieve its
full development as what Michael Omi and Howard Winant
call “a social formation,” racism must, in their words,
become a “political project” that “creates or reproduces structures
of domination based on essentialist categories of race.” 42
The projects that brought racism to ideological fruition and
gave it the independent capacity to shape the societies and
polities of the United States and Germany in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries were organized efforts
to reverse or limit the emancipation of blacks in the former
country and of Jews in the latter.
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