Racism : A Short History
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1) I have placed text that is essential
for your homework and the upcoming paper in italics. Be
sure that you understand the author exactly in such passages.
2) The reading
hints scattered through the text will help you answer the
homework questions (which, in turn, will help you write the
paper).The hints are there for you, not me, so do check them
out as you read.
3) I have
linked words from the reading that you might not know to the
course glossary.
4) MUCH OF THE
ESSAY IS A CAREFUL CONSIDERATION OF THE DEFINITION OF RACISM;
DON'T ASSUME YOU KNOW HOW THE AUTHOR USES THE TERM UNTIL YOU
READ THE CHAPTER.
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Edited excerpts from:
Racism : A Short History
by George M. Fredrickson
Princeton University Press, 2002
Introduction
The term "racism" is often used
in a loose and unreflective way
to describe the hostile or negative feelings of one ethnic group
or "people" toward another and the actions resulting from
such attitudes. [reading
hint 1] But sometimes the antipathy
of one group toward another is expressed and acted upon with a single-mindedness
and brutality that go far beyond the group-centered prejudice and
snobbery that seem to constitute an almost universal human failing.
Hitler invoked racist theories to justify his genocidal
treatment of European Jewry, as did white supremacists in the American
South to explain why Jim Crow laws were needed to keep whites and
blacks separated and unequal…
Hitler, it has been said, gave racism a bad name. The moral revulsion
of people throughout the world against what the Nazis did, reinforced
by scientific studies undermining racist genetics (or eugenics),
served to discredit the scientific racism that had been respectable
and influential in the United States and Europe before the Second
World War…
The defeat of Nazi Germany, the desegregation of the American South
in the 1960s, and the establishment of majority rule in South Africa
suggest that regimes based on biological racism ...are a thing of
the past. But racism does not require the full and explicit support
of the state and the law. Nor does it require an ideology centered
on the concept of biological inequality. Discrimination by institutions
and individuals against those perceived as racially different can
long persist and even flourish under the illusion of nonracism…The
use of allegedly deep-seated cultural differences as a justification
for hostility and discrimination against newcomers from the Third
World in several European countries has led to allegations of a
new "cultural racism." Similarly, those sympathetic to
the plight of poor African Americans and Latinos in the United States
have described as "racist" the view of some whites that
many denizens of the ghettos and
barrios can be written off as incurably infected by cultural pathologies.
From the historian's perspective such recent examples of cultural
determinism are not in fact unprecedented.
They rather represent a reversion
to the way that the differences between ethno-racial groups could
be made to seem indelible and unbridgeable
before the articulation of a scientific
or naturalistic (that is, grounded in biology) conception of race
in the eighteenth century.
The aim of this book is to present in a concise fashion the story
of racism's rise and decline (although not yet, unfortunately, its
fall) from the Middle Ages to the present. To achieve this, I have
tried to give racism a more precise definition than mere ethnocentric
dislike (italics added) and distrust of the [“Other.”]
The word "racism" first came into common usage in the
1930s when a new word was required to describe the theories on which
the Nazis based their persecution of the Jews. As is the case with
many of the terms historians use, the phenomenon existed before
the coinage of the word that we
use to describe it. But our understanding of what beliefs and behaviors
are to be considered "racist" has been unstable. Somewhere
between the view that racism is a peculiar modern idea without much
historical precedent and the notion that it is simply a
manifestation of the ancient phenomenon of tribalism or xenophobia
may lie a working definition that covers more than scientific or
biological racism but less than the kind of group prejudice based
on culture, religion, or simply a sense of family or kinship.
It is when differences that might otherwise be considered ethnocultural
are regarded as innate, indelible,
and unchangeable that a racist attitude or ideology can be said
to exist (italics added). It finds its clearest expression
when the kind of ethnic differences that are firmly rooted in language,
customs, and kinship are overridden in the name of an imagined collectivity
based on pigmentation, as in white
supremacy, or on a linguistically based myth of remote descent from
a superior race, as in Aryanism. But racism as I conceive it is
not merely an attitude or set of beliefs; it also expresses itself
in the practices, institutions, and structures that a sense of deep
difference justifies or validates. Racism, therefore, is more
than theorizing about human differences or thinking badly of
a group over which one has no control. It either directly sustains
or proposes to establish a racial order, a permanent group hierarchy
that is believed to reflect the laws of nature or the decrees
of God. Racism in this sense is neither [an always present element]
of human social existence [or] a universal "consciousness of
kind." … [I]t originated in at least a prototypical form
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries rather than in the eighteenth
or nineteenth (as is sometimes maintained) and was originally articulated
in the idioms of religion more
than in those of natural science.
Racism is therefore not merely "xenophobia"--a
term invented by the ancient Greeks to describe a reflexive feeling
of hostility to the stranger or Other (italics added). Xenophobia
may be a starting point upon which racism can be constructed, but
it is not the thing itself. For an understanding of the emergence
of Western racism in the late Middle Ages and early modern period,
a clear distinction between racism and religious intolerance is
crucial. The religious bigot condemns and persecutes others for
what they believe, not for what they intrinsically
are... If a heathen can be redeemed through baptism, or if an ethnic
stranger can be assimilated into the tribe or the culture in such
a way that his or her origins cease to matter in any significant
way, we are in the presence of an attitude that often creates conflict
and misery, but not one that should be labeled racist.…Racism
is not operative if members of stigmatized groups can voluntarily
change their identities and advance to positions of prominence and
prestige within the dominant group (italics added). Examples
would include the medieval bishops who had converted from Judaism
and the [Muslim] Ottoman generals who had been born Christian. [reading
hint 2]
My theory or conception of racism, therefore, has
two components: difference and power. [reading
hint 3] It originates from a mind-set
that regards "them" as different from "us" in
ways that are permanent and unbridgeable (italics added). This
sense of difference provides a motive or rationale for using our
power advantage to treat the ethnoracial “Other” in
ways that we would regard as cruel or unjust if applied to members
of our own group...In all manifestations of racism from the mildest
to the most severe, what is being denied is the possibility that
the racializers and the racialized can coexist in the same society,
except perhaps on the basis of domination and subordination. Also
rejected [in racist thinking] is any notion that individuals can
obliterate ethno- racial difference by changing their identities.
I will concentrate on racism in Europe. . .since the fifteenth century.
. . [because] even if it has existed elsewhere in rudimentary form,
the virus of racism did not infect Europe itself prior to the
period between the late medieval and early modern periods (italics
added). [reading
hint 4] Hence we can study its
emergence in a time and place for which we have a substantial historical
record. …Particular attention is paid … to Spain, the
first great colonizing nation and a seedbed for Western attitudes
toward race.
Chapter 1 (excerpts)
It is the dominant view among scholars who have studied conceptions
of difference in the ancient world no concept truly equivalent to
that of "race" can be detected in the thought of the Greeks,
Romans, and Christians. The Greeks distinguished between the civilized
and the barbarous, but these categories do not seem to been regarded
as hereditary. .. The Romans had slaves representing all the colors
and nationalities found on the frontiers of their empire and citizens
of corresponding diversity from among those who were free and proffered
their allegiance to the republic or the emperor. After extensive
research the classical scholar Frank Snowden could find no evidence
that dark skin color served as the basis of invidious
distinctions anywhere in the ancient world. The early Christians
for example, celebrated the conversion of Africans as evidence for
their faith in the spiritual equality of all human beings.
It would of course be stretching a point to claim
that there was no ethnic prejudice in antiquity. The refusal of
dispersed Jews to accept the religious and cultural hegemony
of the gentile nations or empires within which they resided sometimes
aroused hostility against them. But abandoning their ethnoreligious
exceptionalism and worshiping the
local divinities (or accepting Christianity once it had been established)
was an option open to them that would have eliminated most of the
Otherness that made them unpopular...
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the attitudes of European
Christians toward Jews became more hostile in ways that laid a foundation
for the racism that later developed. Once welcomed as international
merchants and traders, Jews were increasingly forced by commercial
competition from Christian merchant guilds
into the unpopular and putatively sinful
occupation of lending money at interest. But in this period of intense
religiosity, it was the spiritual threat Jews allegedly represented
that inspired most of the violence against them. Massacres of Jews
began at the time of the First Crusade in 1096. In a few communities,
mobs, stirred up by the rhetoric associated with the campaign to
redeem the Holy Land from Muslims, turned on local Jews. Later Crusades
stimulated more such pogroms...But even the mobs did not regard
Jews as beyond redemption. Most historians affirm that to be baptized
rather than killed was a real option…[reading
hint 5]
If racial anti-Semitism had medieval antecedents
in the popular tendency to see Jews as agents of the Devil and thus,
for all practical purposes, beyond redemption and outside the circle
of potential Christian fellowship, the other principal form of modern
racism --the color-coded, white- over-black variety -- did not have
significant medieval roots and was mainly a product of the modern
period. In fact there was a definite tendency toward Negrophilia
[love of all things black] in parts of northern and western Europe
in the late Middle Ages, and the common presumption that dark pigmentation
inspired instant revulsion on the part of light-skinned Europeans
is, if not completely false, at least highly misleading (italics
added)…
Medieval iconography associated with what the French cultural historian
Henri Bauder has called "le bon Negre." Building on scriptural
evidence that the first non-Jewish convert to Christianity was an
Ethiopian eunuch, exponents of spreading the gospel honored black
converts as living evidence of the universality of their faith.
There was an unmistakable recognition of Otherness in this tradition;
it seemed to say that even those who are as alien and different
from us as black Africans can be brothers and sisters in Christ.
But in the late Middle Ages, in the period between the latter Crusades
and the Portuguese encounter with West Africa in the mid-fifteenth
century, a favorable, sometimes glorified, image of blacks seems
to have become ascendant in the
western European mind. At roughly the same time that Jews were
being demonized, blacks --or at least some blacks-- were being sanctified
(italics added).
A central element in late medieval Negrophilia was the myth of Prester
John, a non-European Christian monarch, first identified with India,
then with the Tartars, and ultimately with the actual Christian
kingdom of Ethiopia. In the European imagination, the African leader
of Prester John would join Western Christians in the struggle against
Islam, which by the time that the association with black Africa
was clearly established in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth
centuries had come to mean primarily the Turkish expansion into
the Mediterranean and southeastern Europe. ..When the Portuguese
actually reached Ethiopia by sea from the Indian Ocean in the early
sixteenth century, they were unimpressed with what they found, and
the Ethiopians were gradually relegated to the fringes of the European
imagination.
But while it lasted, the cult of Prester John and Ethiopia was only
one of several signs that blacks could be represented in a positive
and dignified manner in the late Middle Ages. Another was the practice
that developed of representing one of the Magi in Nativity scenes
as black or African. [Caspar or Gaspar, as he was called, was held
by some to be the ancestor of Prester John.] Equally remarkable
was the cult of the originally white Saint Maurice, who quite suddenly
turned black...Other blacks often presented in saintly or heroic
postures were Saint Gregory the Moor
and Parzifal's mulatto half brother Feirefiz.
The representation of the African as Christian saint or hero…weakens
the argument that Europeans were strongly prejudiced against blacks
before the beginning of the slave trade and that color-coded racism
preceded enslavement...
Historians Bernard Lewis and William McKee Evans have presented
much evidence to support the view that the Islamic world
preceded the Christian in representing
sub-Saharan Africans as descendants of Ham, who were cursed condemned
to perpetual bondage because of their ancestor’s mistreatment
of his father, Noah, as described in an obscure passage in Genesis.
Although medieval Arabs and Moors
had white slaves as well as black and thus did not practice the
purely racial slavery that Europeans carried the New World in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they [medieval Arabs and Moors]
generally assigned blacks [slaves] the most menial
and degrading tasks…
Initially skin color probably had relatively little do with [Europeans'
choice of Africans for slavery]. The conversions of the last pagan
Slavs of Eastern Europe and Russia meant that there were virtually
no European populations available for enslavement under the religious
sanction. If there had been, would [Europeans] have toiled alongside
Africans on New World plantations? Quite possibly... What seems
clear, however, is that the initial purchase and transport of African
slaves by Europeans could easily be justified in terms of religious
and legal status without recourse
to an explicit racism.
Closer to modern racism, arguably its first real anticipation,
was the treatment of Jewish converts to Christianity in fifteenth-
and sixteenth-century Spain (italics added). Conversos (Jews
who had converted to Christianity) were identified and discriminated
against because of the belief held by some Christians that the impurity
of their blood made them incapable of experiencing a true conversion.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Spain was, by medieval
standards, a tolerant plural society in which Christians, Muslims,
and Jews coexisted in relative harmony under Christian monarchs
who accorded a substantial degree
of self-government to each religious community." But in the
late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries an intensification
of the conflict with the Moors
heightened religious zeal and (triggered) an increase in discrimination
against Muslims and Jews. For Jews the growing intolerance turned
violent in 1391, when a wave of pogroms
swept through the kingdoms of Castille and Aragon. As in earlier
pogroms in northern Europe, Jews were given the choice of conversion
or death, but unlike the Jews of the Rhineland
at the time of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, a
large proportion of the persecuted Spanish Jews chose to convert
rather than become martyrs to their faith.
In 1412, discriminatory legislation created another mass of converts.
Finally, when Jews as such were expelled from Spain in 1492, many
chose baptism as an alternative to expatriation.
Consequently Spain's population in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
included a group unique in Europe composed of hundreds of thousands,
possibly about half a million formerly Jewish "New Christians"
or conversos. The sheer numbers of converts made traditional
forms of assimilation more difficult. Rather than absorption of
small numbers of individuals or families into Christian society,
it was now a question of the incorporation
of what amounted to a substantial ethnic group that, despite its
change of religious affiliation,
retained elements of cultural distinctiveness (italics added).
Historians of Jews and Judaism disagree on the extent to which these
conversions created believing Christians or secret Jews. There is
no doubt, however, that the Inquisition proceeded from the assumption
that Jewish ancestry per se justified
the suspicion of covert "judaizing." Both doctrinal
heresy and enmity toward Christians
came to be seen as the likely, even inevitable, consequence of having
Jewish "blood."" The dominant view of recent historians
is that, after the first generation at least, most of those with
Jewish ancestry who remained in Spain became believing Catholics.
In many cases, intermarriage with Christians diminished the salience
of Jewish descent. Yet under the doctrine
of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood), they could still became
victims of a form of discrimination that appears to have been more
racial than religious (italics added)…
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain is critical to the history
of Western racism because its attitudes and practices served as
a kind of segue between the religious
intolerance of the Middle Ages and the naturalistic racism of the
modern era. The idiom remained
religious, and what was inherited through the "blood"
was a propensity to heresy
or unbelief rather than intellectual or emotional inferiority. In
contrast to this new proto-racism against Jews, Spaniards did not
think the “innocent savages" who embraced Spanish civilization
and Catholicism in the Iberian
colonies of the new world [reading
hint 6] carried impure blood. Discrimination
against Indians persisted after they were baptized, but it was based
on culture more than ancestry. Mestizos
who had adopted Spanish ways could be admitted to religious orders
that excluded Jewish converts. The problem that was created
for the Spanish by Jews and Moors
was that their conversion (especially if forced, as it normally
was) did not necessarily induce them to sacrifice their ethnic identity
or pride in their ancestry. Such ethnic difference, even if accompanied
by a sincere profession of Christian faith, became intolerable in
Spain at a time when a strong national identity was being formed
(italics added). As Hispanidad [the new land of Spain after
Muslim had been expelled] was being constructed in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, limpieza de sangre (purity of
blood) was a way of excluding those who did not meet the requirements
for a new and more demanding conception of what it meant to be Spanish.
The context was the Reconquista, a heightened emphasis on Spain
as the champion of the True Church, and the growth of an empire
that would serve as a theatre to demonstrate Spanish heroism and
piety."