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

corrupt by nature and not because of their beliefs. 48 Marr
was the earliest of many theorists who argued that Jews
were innately evil and beyond redemption. In 1880, Karl
Eugen Dühring published The Jewish Question as a Problem
of Racial Character, a fuller and more sophisticated exposition
of the new racist antisemitism. 49 The time would
come, Marr, Dühring, and others warned, when the German
victims of Jewish aggression would strike back and
punish the Jews for their diabolical conspiracies.
In the United States racism as an ideology of inherent
black inferiority emerged into the clear light of day in reaction
to the rise of northern abolitionism in the 1830s—as a
response to the radical demands for emancipation at a time
when the federal government was committed to the protection
of slavery. 50 Defenders of black servitude needed a justification
of the institution that was consistent with the decline
of social deference and the extension of suffrage rights
among white males, a democratization process that took
place in the South as well as the North. They found it in
theories that made white domination and black subservience
seem natural and unavoidable. Some proslavery politicians
and publicists had recourse to the American School
of Ethnology and its contention that the “types of mankind”
were created separate and unequal. But this apparent
revision of the book of Genesis was unpalatable to many
of the orthodox evangelical Christians who were becoming
increasingly influential in the religious life of the South.
Those who were versed in scientific ethnology but wished
to avoid contradicting the Genesis story simply adopted
the eighteenth-century theory that blacks had degenerated
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