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

TWO The Rise of Modern Racism(s)
and that inferior breeds would not survive in “the struggle
for existence.” 64 In both the United States and Germany the
eugenics movement, which began in England as a biological
approach to class differences, was eventually applied to
racial and ethnic groups. The belief that government intervention
was required to weed out or neutralize inferior
breeding stock could justify a variety of policies, including
immigration restriction, prohibition of interracial marriage,
the forced sterilization of undesirables, and ultimately
the euthanasia of entire categories of people. 65
Nevertheless, despite all these similarities between the
context and character of emergent racism in the United
States and Germany toward the end of the nineteenth century
and the beginning of the twentieth, the differences are
even more significant. In the first place, the economic and
social competition set off by emancipation involved different
classes or strata of society. The freed slaves in the United
States competed mainly with lower- or working-class
whites. Employers who wished to undermine the ability of
their white workers to organize and bargain from strength
frequently used African Americans as strikebreakers. It was
in this context that a distinctive white working-class racism
took shape on the assumption that only white men were
loyal to their fellow workers. Blacks and Chinese immigrants
(and at times even swarthy newcomers from southern
and eastern Europe who did seem quite white) were
deemed genetically incapable of class solidarity and were
therefore potential tools of exploitative employers. 66 In the
rural South, the many white farmers who were losing land
and independence during the long cotton depression of the
late nineteenth century clung more desperately than ever
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