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

to the automatic social status that inhered in their white
skins. In the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, “the white group of
laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated
in part by a sort of public and psychological wage.
They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because
they were white.” 67 To acknowledge that workingand
lower-class whites felt particularly threatened by blacks
is not to exempt the middle and upper classes from racial
prejudice. But a greater sense of status and security permitted
privileged whites to be more relaxed and paternalistic
in their relationship with blacks, whom they encountered
mainly as servants or service workers. 68
In Germany, on the other hand, the zone of actual or
potential competition between Jews and gentiles was in the
middle or professional classes. The successful beneficiaries
of the increase in rights and opportunities that came with
the unification and industrialization of Germany were
doing quite well by the end of the century in commerce,
journalism, medicine, and the law, as well as in the realms
where small numbers of Jews had traditionally been able to
situate themselves—banking and finance. Hence Jews were,
unlike African Americans, in direct competition with members
of the ethnic majority’s middle class. Jewish-owned
department stores, for example, sometimes drove gentile
shopkeepers out of business. What was more, Jewish businessmen
often employed clerks, white-collar workers, and
even servants who belonged to that majority. Almost never
in the United States during this period were blacks in a
position to exert authority over whites. (The fact that Jewish
babies in Germany were sometimes wet-nursed by
Christian women, a practice that the Nazis later outlawed,
87