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Racism: A Short History
Are antisemitism and white supremacy manifestations of a general phenomenon? Why didn't racism appear in Europe before the fourteenth century, and why did it flourish as never before in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Why did the twentieth century see institutionalized racism in its most extreme forms? Why are egalitarian societies particularly susceptible to virulent racism? What do apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany, and the American South under Jim Crow have in common? How did the Holocaust advance civil rights in the United States?
With a rare blend of learning, economy, and cutting insight, George Fredrickson surveys the history of Western racism from its emergence in the late Middle Ages to the present. Beginning with the medieval antisemitism that put Jews beyond the pale of humanity, he traces the spread of racist thinking in the wake of European expansionism and the beginnings of the African slave trade. And he examines how the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century romantic nationalism created a new intellectual context for debates over slavery and Jewish emancipation.
Fredrickson then makes the first sustained comparison between the color-coded racism of nineteenth-century America and the antisemitic racism that appeared in Germany around the same time. He finds similarity enough to justify the common label but also major differences in the nature and functions of the stereotypes invoked. The book concludes with a provocative account of the rise and decline of the twentieth century's overtly racist regimes--the Jim Crow South, Nazi Germany, and apartheid South Africa--in the context of world historical developments.
This illuminating work is the first to treat racism across such a sweep of history and geography. It is distinguished not only by its original comparison of modern racism's two most significant varieties--white supremacy and antisemitism--but also by its eminent readability.
With a rare blend of learning, economy, and cutting insight, George Fredrickson surveys the history of Western racism from its emergence in the late Middle Ages to the present. Beginning with the medieval antisemitism that put Jews beyond the pale of humanity, he traces the spread of racist thinking in the wake of European expansionism and the beginnings of the African slave trade. And he examines how the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century romantic nationalism created a new intellectual context for debates over slavery and Jewish emancipation.
Fredrickson then makes the first sustained comparison between the color-coded racism of nineteenth-century America and the antisemitic racism that appeared in Germany around the same time. He finds similarity enough to justify the common label but also major differences in the nature and functions of the stereotypes invoked. The book concludes with a provocative account of the rise and decline of the twentieth century's overtly racist regimes--the Jim Crow South, Nazi Germany, and apartheid South Africa--in the context of world historical developments.
This illuminating work is the first to treat racism across such a sweep of history and geography. It is distinguished not only by its original comparison of modern racism's two most significant varieties--white supremacy and antisemitism--but also by its eminent readability.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
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About the author
George M. Fredrickson
49 books25 followersGeorge M. Fredrickson was the Edgar E. Robinson Professor of United States History at Stanford University, where he taught from 1984 until his retirement in 2002.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 63 reviews
July 4, 2020
This book was fascinating and I can't believe I missed it until now. Fredrickson tracks anti-semitism in Europe and anti-Black racism in the US and defines how racism was used and how it differs from other forms of hatred. The thesis (or one of them) is that both forms of racism were a response to societal change and the dislocations of modernity on both cultures and the need to scapegoat either Jews or Blacks to restore order. It's a fascinating and essential book.
January 21, 2020
Useful overview of how European racisms emerged from christian religious bigotry & the rise of modernity w/ capitalism & scientism, but the last chapter & the epilogue are very weak. Fredrickson defines racism so narrowly that only Nazi Germany, the Jim Crow US South, aparthied South Africa, & contemporary antisemitism *count*. I appreciate his desire for precision & think we have to do a lot more theorizing & struggling against oppression & exploitation beside just labeling them racist, but I don't see how traducing racism in C20 to apply as a concept to only 3 of the most grotesque & violent regimes is helpful. Fredrickson explicitly argues that one shouldn't consider European imperialism, Ulster or Palestinian occupations, French islamophobia, or rightwing US racialized culturalism as species of racism, which seems absurd & to mimic the racialized culturalism he critiques but distinguishes from racism.
Also, while his comparison & contrast of C19 white supremacism & antisemitism were very interesting & helpful, he underplays the role of 'Indian-hating' in the Americas as constitutive for modern European & American racisms.
Also, while his comparison & contrast of C19 white supremacism & antisemitism were very interesting & helpful, he underplays the role of 'Indian-hating' in the Americas as constitutive for modern European & American racisms.
July 16, 2008
This author takes a close look at three historical instances of racism: The American South, Nazi Germany and the apartheid regime of South Africa. Through a discussion of these three he develops a framework for identifying racism vs. culturalism or generally xenophobia. While I found his historical overview intersting, I sensed an underlying assumption that racism was rational decision. He did not accoutn much for the non-rational aspects of racism: fear of the "other," identity insecurity, self-loathing, etc. As such I was left feeling something signficant was missing.
The other major shortcoming is that Fredrickson tells the history from the dominant culture point of view, rarely drawing on sources from the oppressed. he quote Dubois a couple of times but other than that all his sources were white European.
Finally, by only focusing on the three instances of historic racism, he overlooks other examples: American Indians, Chinese and Japanese and other racial/ethnic groups that were equally victims organized racism. Fredrickson so narrowly defines racism to exclude these groups
However what was helpful was to see how "racism" went from being an acceptable scientific term in dominant society to being a negative term after the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews. He also forces us to reckon with the fact that white history has justified racism for a long time,and only in the last 60 years has begun to really turn this around. He also helps us see the interplay of law and behavior, even though he has largely omitted the emotional and psychological.
The other major shortcoming is that Fredrickson tells the history from the dominant culture point of view, rarely drawing on sources from the oppressed. he quote Dubois a couple of times but other than that all his sources were white European.
Finally, by only focusing on the three instances of historic racism, he overlooks other examples: American Indians, Chinese and Japanese and other racial/ethnic groups that were equally victims organized racism. Fredrickson so narrowly defines racism to exclude these groups
However what was helpful was to see how "racism" went from being an acceptable scientific term in dominant society to being a negative term after the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews. He also forces us to reckon with the fact that white history has justified racism for a long time,and only in the last 60 years has begun to really turn this around. He also helps us see the interplay of law and behavior, even though he has largely omitted the emotional and psychological.
August 27, 2025
Racism was a term which first entered popular circulation in the 1930s to describe the theories underpinning the policies of Nazi Germany. This book posits that racism first existed in a progenitor form in the Middle Ages. Racism signifies a dislike or distrust of some “other” based on that “other’s” supposedly inherent and immutable characteristics. This makes racism different from xenophobia. Xenophobia was the term coined by the ancient Greeks to describe a supposedly innate fear and distrust of others (today this could also be referred to as ingroup bias or tribalism). Xenophobia can be theoretically overcome by assimilating the “others” into the in-group. Racism cannot be overcome by assimilation because the “other“ is inherently different and these immutable characteristics cannot be changed. Often, the characteristics that make up a “race” take the physical form of pigmentation differences as well as other physical features. Racism allows the in-group (one’s own race) to treat the outgroup (other races) in ways that it was never treat members of the ingroup because of the unbridgeable differences between the two. This difference in treatment ranges from discrimination all the way up to and including total genocide.
Origins of racism in the middle ages
The ancient Greeks did not have a concept of race or racism. Instead, they distinguish between “civilized” and “barbarian“ peoples. You were civilized if you lived in a city state and participated in political civil life, and you were barbarians if you did not. These categories were not hereditable, they were not based on any type of skin color, pigmentation (in fact, there is no evidence anywhere in the ancient world that dark skin color was used as a basis for drawing distinctions between people ), or physical characteristics, and above all these categories could readily be changed depending on whether one lived in a city-state or not.
The closest thing we can find to early forms of racism were the Christians’ discrimination against Jews. Christianity grew out of Judaism, and to distinguish themselves from the Jews, Christians wrote into the Bible the greatest sin they could possibly attribute to the Jews: they helped murder Jesus. The Christians placed a collective guilt onto all Jews for this crime, and any Jews remaining on Earth only did so because they refused to convert to Christianity. However, since Christianity grew out of Judaism, and since the earliest Christian writers were themselves Jews, it was not possible for Christians to view Jews as a people who had always been inherently irredeemable. They were the enemy whom Christians viewed with innate disdain and suspicion, but Jews could be changed from enemies to friends through religious conversions and baptisms.
Antisemitism grew out of anti-Judaism, with the difference being that antisemitism believed it would be easier and better to eradicate Jews than to convert them to Christianity, and antisemitism became racism when it believed that Jews were inherently and hereditarily different than Christians to such a degree that they were incapable of conversion. In the 12th and 13th centuries in medieval Europe, Jews began to be transformed, in the eyes of Christians, from non-believers to people who were in league with the devil himself. Rumors that Jews poisoned villages and sacrificed children abounded. As plague ravaged the continent to an apocalyptic degree, Jews caught blame for that as well. These black legends made Jews seem less than human, inherently irredeemable, and unconvertible to Christianity. Jews became the scapegoats that millions of Christians blamed for the turmoil, upheavals, and general changes in lifestyle that were occurring in the 1100-1300s. These great upheavals threatened the Church’s hegemony over ideology. This led to the church stamping down on anything that appeared even remotely threatening or ‘different’ to its orthodoxy. This environment of brutal material conditions and ideological intolerance was a breeding ground for proto-racism.
However, the proto/racism of antisemitism did not evolve into racism against black Africans. European contact with Africans was relatively limited until the 1500s, and although the color black was often associated with the devil in folklorist traditions, more often than not black people were seen as mysterious, but not lesser than a white skinned European person. Due to the centrality of
religion in medieval Europeans’ lives, a black person was not important due to their skin color, but rather due to their religious beliefs. Christians disliked black Muslims but liked black Christians. We therefore have very little evidence that Europeans were prejudice against black people before the European slave trade; resentment towards black Africans followed the slave trade rather than preceded it. Only in Iberia, where black Muslims and Spanish Christians came head-to-head, was blackness seen as synonymous with servitude because the Christians there experienced the Muslim slave trade of Africans first-hand.
Racism in the Iberian Peninsula
Coming into contact with West Africa, Europeans were given access to a systemic and fully functional African slave trade at the same time that European slavery was dwindling. The dwindling of slavery occurred for a few overlapping reasons: Europeans found it hard to ideologically justify enslaving other Christians, most Europeans had been converted from paganism to Christianity (the Slavs were the last of these converts, hence why so many Slavs were slaves and why the term “slavery“ grew out of “Slav”), and the practice of trading captive soldiers for ransom rather than enslaving them had become much more common throughout feudal Europe. coming into contact with West Africa. Europeans had few qualms about taking advantage of the fact that enslaved Africans were not Christians, which made it easier to justify their enslavement. These slaves would readily be available to use as the grunt labor force on plantations of the colonized New World. The early slave trade of African slaves by Europeans was easily justified by religion, which negated most incentives to create a racist ideology to justify their enslavement.
So, while the Iberians did not need to devolve racism to justify their position in the African slave trade, in 15th and 16th century Spain views developed which were much closer equivalents to modern racism. This racism revolved around the treatment of Jewish converts (“Conversos”). The intense conflict between the Catholic Church/crown in Spain with the Muslim Moors, which resulted in the Christian reconquista of Spain in 1492, was what precipitated this religious intolerance. Christians felt threatened by the power of Muslims and therefore closed ranks and drew down much harder boundaries on what constituted a Christian. They increasingly forced ever larger numbers of Jews to convert; Jews had the choice to convert to Christianity by force, immigrate else and allow their property to be expropriated in the process, or die by the hands of Christians. Massive pogroms against Jews spread across most of Spain, and in the wake of this massive threat most Jews chose to convert to Christianity. Unfortunately for them, this large amount of Jewish converts was historically unprecedented (the approximately 500,000 converted Jews in Spain were more than anywhere else in Europe), and the Spanish crown had no way to easily assimilate these Jews into Christendom. Previously, Jews could be married into christian families to really solidify their religious conversion; this was not possible for 500,000 people. These recent converts appeared to be a Jewish ‘fifth column’ who were only biding their time before they rose up against their Christian oppressors.
To keep track of these distrusted recent converts, the Spanish crown instituted a system of tracking ones’ lineage. Recently converted Jews, whose bloodline directly descended from Jews, were labeled as Conversos. Conversos, due to their lineage, faced legal and institutionalized discrimination. Importantly, they were barred from many public offices and prevented from partaking in the conquest of the Americas. For Europeans ‘bloodlines’ had always been important. The blood coursing through a person’s veins was apparently what distinguished someone as nobility. The systematic way with which the Spanish distinguished between pure and impure bloodlines, though, was the first time that this had been implemented to a large ethnic group. People living under the rule of the Spanish crown had to have certifications proving that their bloodline was either pure or impure; this was a step towards modern racism. Although Spain’s institutionalized anti-semitism still grew out a religious distrust for Jews by Christians, the way in which the Catholic Church and Spanish crown treated Jews as inherently and irreparably different than Christians due to their “impure blood” resulting from their equally “impure bloodlines” was a qualitative leap towards a new form of racism that eschewed religion for biology.
At the same time Spain was internally codifying racial blood claws, they were externally colonizing the Americas. Their experience colonizing the Canary Islands, as well as popular medieval mythologies and folk tales which believed that the far reaches of the Earth were populated by subhuman monsters and “wild men”, influenced the way they viewed the indigenous of the Americas. When Spain had colonized the Canary Islands near Africa, they proceeded to enslave the islands’ inhabitants on the justification that they were wild men and savages. Eventually, the church prohibited the enslavement of the indigenous peoples of the Canary Islands, arguing that it distracted from the Church’s ability to turn these wild pagans into Christians. When Columbus landed in the Americas, one of the first things he did was draw direct comparisons between the islanders of Hispaniola and the Canary Islands.
According to the colonizers there were two types of Native Americans:
1.The Native Americans who were not overtly hostile to the colonizers were believed to be child-like simpletons. They were apparently not far removed from a supposed “state of nature” and would therefore make easy converts to Christianity. This was the origin of the ‘noble savage’ trope
2. The Native Americans who fought back were portrayed as rabid cannibals. They inherently were incapable of conversion to Christianity and would have to be killed
The racism born out of the Iberian Peninsula still relied on religion. It therefore, was, which distinguishes it from modern racism. Spanish and Portuguese discriminated against Muslims and Jews because they had been exposed to Christianity and rejected it, even after their force conversion they were still seen as harboring an inherent rejection of God and sympathy with the devil. The pagan Africans and Native Americans, on the other hand, were believed to have never been exposed to God. Therefore, in the eyes of the Iberians, although these ‘pagans’ were lesser, they could still be converted to Christianity.
Curse of Ham
As the indigenous population of the Americas died due to genocide and disease, which was often seen as the will of God and proof that these pagans deserved it, African slaves were used to suplant their labor. The enslavement of Africans was justified by the Biblical story of the “curse of Ham”. In the book of Genesis, Ham drew the wrath of God by viewing his father, Noah, naked and was therefore cursed into servitude for all his generations. Slave masters and their ideological supporters argued that Africans were the sons of Ham, and their black skin was the visual signifier of this curse. Christians, and previously discussed, did not want to enslave people that had been baptized and converted to Christianity; historically, slaves who were baptized often were set free. The Son of Ham story helped circumvent this by “proving” that it was God‘s will for Africans to be enslaved. Their enslavement was immutable and passed down over generations.
Christianity proved to be an extremely malleable ideology for racist thinking; it was readily used as justification to promote ideas that emphasized ineradicable and supernatural differences between Christians and Jews, or between white skinned Europeans and black skinned Africans. Jews were generationally cursed for killing Christ, while black people were generationally cursed for the sins of Ham. However, these views came into contradiction with the Christian notion that anyone could be saved by giving themselves up to God through conversion rituals such as baptism. Christianity therefore laid the foundations for modern racism, but could not see it through to its full flowering. Although many groups could take advantage of the ideological malleability of Christianity, such as slave traders or the Spanish crown, there were just as many churches and Christians within them who rejected these notions and still attempted to evangelize and convert Jews and black Africans. Many people drew from the exact same ideological source as the racist Christians to argue the exact opposite conclusion: that there were not immutable differences between Christians in Europe and Jews, Muslims, black people, Native Americans, etc in the eyes of God.
The Enlightenment
The modern ideas of races, in which all people can be categorized and labeled based on physical characteristics such as skin color, did not appear until the 1700s. The scientific thought that grew out of the Enlightenment was a necessary precondition for the construction of a more ‘scientific’ and less supernatural racism. The more modern “scientific racism” at first argued that one’s immutable and inherent characteristics on physical features were associated with the region a person’s lineage descended from. In 1735, Carl Linnaeus, a father of modern biology and the developer of binomial nomenclature (two-name system for all living organisms), characterized humans as a species of primate. He then further subcategorized humans into what he saw as scientific types (although he included some mythical categories which were holdovers of medieval myths and legends). This was an inherently racist process which differentiated humans between ‘Europeans’, ‘Asians’, ‘Africans’, and ‘American Indians’. His description of the races clearly showed his bias: while Europeans were inherently resourceful and creative, black Africans were inherently indolent.
Another example of the pervasiveness of racist thinking in the formation of modern science appeared in the works of the father of modern anthropology: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. In 1776 he published “On the Natural Variety of Mankind” which recognized that all humans belonged to a single species which shared a common ancestry. Even still, he divided humans into 5 categories based on the continents: Caucasians, Mongolians, Ethiopians, Americans, and Malay-based people. He traced white people to the Caucasus (hence the term ‘Caucasian’) and did so because of how the supposed “beauty” of the peoples of the Caucasus was nearly identical to the “beauty” of white Europeans. These Caucasians, he claimed, were the original human race from which all others diverged or degenerated from.
These scientific thinkers bridged the gap between humans and animals; we were no longer unquestionably children of God created in God’s own image; we were animals just like apes, birds, fish, and all the rest. This ‘naturalistic chain of being’ (as opposed to the ‘divine chain of being’ which saw god at the top, humans in the middle, and animals at the bottom) could be employed to say that some humans, such as black people, were closer to apes and other animals than other humans, such as white Caucasians. Humanity all shared a common origin, but the variations that resulted in the apparent “separate races” were caused by environmental differences and were very hard to overcome. It seemed obvious to many people in the 1700s that the differences in skin color between black and white people could be attributed to the temperatures and climates that they lived under. However, most took this a step farther to argue that environmental factors had inherently made Europeans intellectually superior to the other races as well. Some even proposed a vulgar-materialist conception of this superiority, arguing that the abundance of fertile soil and sources of food had made Africans lazy and therefore stupid. Europeans, who had to work hard for their sustenance, had been made into a more inventive and innovative race thanks to environmental factors. Climate had degenerated the other races from the progenitor and superior Caucasian race, but when (forcibly) transplanting African slaves to the Americas and keeping them there for generations did not make their skin any less black, it seemed reasonable to assume that it would take a very long time to reverse these climactic disparities.
In the minds of European racist ideologues, there was no reason to consider other races as cultural and intellectual equals to Europeans, although over time they could possibly be molded into their equals through “civilizing” processes. European dominance over other “races” (ex: enslavement of Africans, colonization of India, victories over China in the Opium wars, to name a few) provided the living justification for the idea that white people were the most superior race. There was a purely aesthetic aspect to this racism; white people believed other white people to be the most attractive of the races, and they imposed these beauty standards upon others. Physical characteristics such as skull shape also became important (and equally pseudoscientific) signifiers of intelligence. In the wake of the French revolution and the flowering of liberal democracy, questions arose about who was “fit“ for citizenship. In France, women, children, and the insane were not given the rights of citizenship, which include the right to vote. Theoretical questions soon sprung up about the right of certain races to be citizens, although in France these remained purely theoretical because it was almost entirely made up of the Caucasian race. In America, however, the idea that the white race was more worthy of citizenship than other races was fully put into practice.
Origins of racism in the middle ages
The ancient Greeks did not have a concept of race or racism. Instead, they distinguish between “civilized” and “barbarian“ peoples. You were civilized if you lived in a city state and participated in political civil life, and you were barbarians if you did not. These categories were not hereditable, they were not based on any type of skin color, pigmentation (in fact, there is no evidence anywhere in the ancient world that dark skin color was used as a basis for drawing distinctions between people ), or physical characteristics, and above all these categories could readily be changed depending on whether one lived in a city-state or not.
The closest thing we can find to early forms of racism were the Christians’ discrimination against Jews. Christianity grew out of Judaism, and to distinguish themselves from the Jews, Christians wrote into the Bible the greatest sin they could possibly attribute to the Jews: they helped murder Jesus. The Christians placed a collective guilt onto all Jews for this crime, and any Jews remaining on Earth only did so because they refused to convert to Christianity. However, since Christianity grew out of Judaism, and since the earliest Christian writers were themselves Jews, it was not possible for Christians to view Jews as a people who had always been inherently irredeemable. They were the enemy whom Christians viewed with innate disdain and suspicion, but Jews could be changed from enemies to friends through religious conversions and baptisms.
Antisemitism grew out of anti-Judaism, with the difference being that antisemitism believed it would be easier and better to eradicate Jews than to convert them to Christianity, and antisemitism became racism when it believed that Jews were inherently and hereditarily different than Christians to such a degree that they were incapable of conversion. In the 12th and 13th centuries in medieval Europe, Jews began to be transformed, in the eyes of Christians, from non-believers to people who were in league with the devil himself. Rumors that Jews poisoned villages and sacrificed children abounded. As plague ravaged the continent to an apocalyptic degree, Jews caught blame for that as well. These black legends made Jews seem less than human, inherently irredeemable, and unconvertible to Christianity. Jews became the scapegoats that millions of Christians blamed for the turmoil, upheavals, and general changes in lifestyle that were occurring in the 1100-1300s. These great upheavals threatened the Church’s hegemony over ideology. This led to the church stamping down on anything that appeared even remotely threatening or ‘different’ to its orthodoxy. This environment of brutal material conditions and ideological intolerance was a breeding ground for proto-racism.
However, the proto/racism of antisemitism did not evolve into racism against black Africans. European contact with Africans was relatively limited until the 1500s, and although the color black was often associated with the devil in folklorist traditions, more often than not black people were seen as mysterious, but not lesser than a white skinned European person. Due to the centrality of
religion in medieval Europeans’ lives, a black person was not important due to their skin color, but rather due to their religious beliefs. Christians disliked black Muslims but liked black Christians. We therefore have very little evidence that Europeans were prejudice against black people before the European slave trade; resentment towards black Africans followed the slave trade rather than preceded it. Only in Iberia, where black Muslims and Spanish Christians came head-to-head, was blackness seen as synonymous with servitude because the Christians there experienced the Muslim slave trade of Africans first-hand.
Racism in the Iberian Peninsula
Coming into contact with West Africa, Europeans were given access to a systemic and fully functional African slave trade at the same time that European slavery was dwindling. The dwindling of slavery occurred for a few overlapping reasons: Europeans found it hard to ideologically justify enslaving other Christians, most Europeans had been converted from paganism to Christianity (the Slavs were the last of these converts, hence why so many Slavs were slaves and why the term “slavery“ grew out of “Slav”), and the practice of trading captive soldiers for ransom rather than enslaving them had become much more common throughout feudal Europe. coming into contact with West Africa. Europeans had few qualms about taking advantage of the fact that enslaved Africans were not Christians, which made it easier to justify their enslavement. These slaves would readily be available to use as the grunt labor force on plantations of the colonized New World. The early slave trade of African slaves by Europeans was easily justified by religion, which negated most incentives to create a racist ideology to justify their enslavement.
So, while the Iberians did not need to devolve racism to justify their position in the African slave trade, in 15th and 16th century Spain views developed which were much closer equivalents to modern racism. This racism revolved around the treatment of Jewish converts (“Conversos”). The intense conflict between the Catholic Church/crown in Spain with the Muslim Moors, which resulted in the Christian reconquista of Spain in 1492, was what precipitated this religious intolerance. Christians felt threatened by the power of Muslims and therefore closed ranks and drew down much harder boundaries on what constituted a Christian. They increasingly forced ever larger numbers of Jews to convert; Jews had the choice to convert to Christianity by force, immigrate else and allow their property to be expropriated in the process, or die by the hands of Christians. Massive pogroms against Jews spread across most of Spain, and in the wake of this massive threat most Jews chose to convert to Christianity. Unfortunately for them, this large amount of Jewish converts was historically unprecedented (the approximately 500,000 converted Jews in Spain were more than anywhere else in Europe), and the Spanish crown had no way to easily assimilate these Jews into Christendom. Previously, Jews could be married into christian families to really solidify their religious conversion; this was not possible for 500,000 people. These recent converts appeared to be a Jewish ‘fifth column’ who were only biding their time before they rose up against their Christian oppressors.
To keep track of these distrusted recent converts, the Spanish crown instituted a system of tracking ones’ lineage. Recently converted Jews, whose bloodline directly descended from Jews, were labeled as Conversos. Conversos, due to their lineage, faced legal and institutionalized discrimination. Importantly, they were barred from many public offices and prevented from partaking in the conquest of the Americas. For Europeans ‘bloodlines’ had always been important. The blood coursing through a person’s veins was apparently what distinguished someone as nobility. The systematic way with which the Spanish distinguished between pure and impure bloodlines, though, was the first time that this had been implemented to a large ethnic group. People living under the rule of the Spanish crown had to have certifications proving that their bloodline was either pure or impure; this was a step towards modern racism. Although Spain’s institutionalized anti-semitism still grew out a religious distrust for Jews by Christians, the way in which the Catholic Church and Spanish crown treated Jews as inherently and irreparably different than Christians due to their “impure blood” resulting from their equally “impure bloodlines” was a qualitative leap towards a new form of racism that eschewed religion for biology.
At the same time Spain was internally codifying racial blood claws, they were externally colonizing the Americas. Their experience colonizing the Canary Islands, as well as popular medieval mythologies and folk tales which believed that the far reaches of the Earth were populated by subhuman monsters and “wild men”, influenced the way they viewed the indigenous of the Americas. When Spain had colonized the Canary Islands near Africa, they proceeded to enslave the islands’ inhabitants on the justification that they were wild men and savages. Eventually, the church prohibited the enslavement of the indigenous peoples of the Canary Islands, arguing that it distracted from the Church’s ability to turn these wild pagans into Christians. When Columbus landed in the Americas, one of the first things he did was draw direct comparisons between the islanders of Hispaniola and the Canary Islands.
According to the colonizers there were two types of Native Americans:
1.The Native Americans who were not overtly hostile to the colonizers were believed to be child-like simpletons. They were apparently not far removed from a supposed “state of nature” and would therefore make easy converts to Christianity. This was the origin of the ‘noble savage’ trope
2. The Native Americans who fought back were portrayed as rabid cannibals. They inherently were incapable of conversion to Christianity and would have to be killed
The racism born out of the Iberian Peninsula still relied on religion. It therefore, was, which distinguishes it from modern racism. Spanish and Portuguese discriminated against Muslims and Jews because they had been exposed to Christianity and rejected it, even after their force conversion they were still seen as harboring an inherent rejection of God and sympathy with the devil. The pagan Africans and Native Americans, on the other hand, were believed to have never been exposed to God. Therefore, in the eyes of the Iberians, although these ‘pagans’ were lesser, they could still be converted to Christianity.
Curse of Ham
As the indigenous population of the Americas died due to genocide and disease, which was often seen as the will of God and proof that these pagans deserved it, African slaves were used to suplant their labor. The enslavement of Africans was justified by the Biblical story of the “curse of Ham”. In the book of Genesis, Ham drew the wrath of God by viewing his father, Noah, naked and was therefore cursed into servitude for all his generations. Slave masters and their ideological supporters argued that Africans were the sons of Ham, and their black skin was the visual signifier of this curse. Christians, and previously discussed, did not want to enslave people that had been baptized and converted to Christianity; historically, slaves who were baptized often were set free. The Son of Ham story helped circumvent this by “proving” that it was God‘s will for Africans to be enslaved. Their enslavement was immutable and passed down over generations.
Christianity proved to be an extremely malleable ideology for racist thinking; it was readily used as justification to promote ideas that emphasized ineradicable and supernatural differences between Christians and Jews, or between white skinned Europeans and black skinned Africans. Jews were generationally cursed for killing Christ, while black people were generationally cursed for the sins of Ham. However, these views came into contradiction with the Christian notion that anyone could be saved by giving themselves up to God through conversion rituals such as baptism. Christianity therefore laid the foundations for modern racism, but could not see it through to its full flowering. Although many groups could take advantage of the ideological malleability of Christianity, such as slave traders or the Spanish crown, there were just as many churches and Christians within them who rejected these notions and still attempted to evangelize and convert Jews and black Africans. Many people drew from the exact same ideological source as the racist Christians to argue the exact opposite conclusion: that there were not immutable differences between Christians in Europe and Jews, Muslims, black people, Native Americans, etc in the eyes of God.
The Enlightenment
The modern ideas of races, in which all people can be categorized and labeled based on physical characteristics such as skin color, did not appear until the 1700s. The scientific thought that grew out of the Enlightenment was a necessary precondition for the construction of a more ‘scientific’ and less supernatural racism. The more modern “scientific racism” at first argued that one’s immutable and inherent characteristics on physical features were associated with the region a person’s lineage descended from. In 1735, Carl Linnaeus, a father of modern biology and the developer of binomial nomenclature (two-name system for all living organisms), characterized humans as a species of primate. He then further subcategorized humans into what he saw as scientific types (although he included some mythical categories which were holdovers of medieval myths and legends). This was an inherently racist process which differentiated humans between ‘Europeans’, ‘Asians’, ‘Africans’, and ‘American Indians’. His description of the races clearly showed his bias: while Europeans were inherently resourceful and creative, black Africans were inherently indolent.
Another example of the pervasiveness of racist thinking in the formation of modern science appeared in the works of the father of modern anthropology: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. In 1776 he published “On the Natural Variety of Mankind” which recognized that all humans belonged to a single species which shared a common ancestry. Even still, he divided humans into 5 categories based on the continents: Caucasians, Mongolians, Ethiopians, Americans, and Malay-based people. He traced white people to the Caucasus (hence the term ‘Caucasian’) and did so because of how the supposed “beauty” of the peoples of the Caucasus was nearly identical to the “beauty” of white Europeans. These Caucasians, he claimed, were the original human race from which all others diverged or degenerated from.
These scientific thinkers bridged the gap between humans and animals; we were no longer unquestionably children of God created in God’s own image; we were animals just like apes, birds, fish, and all the rest. This ‘naturalistic chain of being’ (as opposed to the ‘divine chain of being’ which saw god at the top, humans in the middle, and animals at the bottom) could be employed to say that some humans, such as black people, were closer to apes and other animals than other humans, such as white Caucasians. Humanity all shared a common origin, but the variations that resulted in the apparent “separate races” were caused by environmental differences and were very hard to overcome. It seemed obvious to many people in the 1700s that the differences in skin color between black and white people could be attributed to the temperatures and climates that they lived under. However, most took this a step farther to argue that environmental factors had inherently made Europeans intellectually superior to the other races as well. Some even proposed a vulgar-materialist conception of this superiority, arguing that the abundance of fertile soil and sources of food had made Africans lazy and therefore stupid. Europeans, who had to work hard for their sustenance, had been made into a more inventive and innovative race thanks to environmental factors. Climate had degenerated the other races from the progenitor and superior Caucasian race, but when (forcibly) transplanting African slaves to the Americas and keeping them there for generations did not make their skin any less black, it seemed reasonable to assume that it would take a very long time to reverse these climactic disparities.
In the minds of European racist ideologues, there was no reason to consider other races as cultural and intellectual equals to Europeans, although over time they could possibly be molded into their equals through “civilizing” processes. European dominance over other “races” (ex: enslavement of Africans, colonization of India, victories over China in the Opium wars, to name a few) provided the living justification for the idea that white people were the most superior race. There was a purely aesthetic aspect to this racism; white people believed other white people to be the most attractive of the races, and they imposed these beauty standards upon others. Physical characteristics such as skull shape also became important (and equally pseudoscientific) signifiers of intelligence. In the wake of the French revolution and the flowering of liberal democracy, questions arose about who was “fit“ for citizenship. In France, women, children, and the insane were not given the rights of citizenship, which include the right to vote. Theoretical questions soon sprung up about the right of certain races to be citizens, although in France these remained purely theoretical because it was almost entirely made up of the Caucasian race. In America, however, the idea that the white race was more worthy of citizenship than other races was fully put into practice.
October 11, 2025
Um clássico da história do racismo. De leitura fácil, atual e necessária.
November 7, 2012
I got pretty sucked into this one. While I had read accounts of the separate development of antisemitism and white supremacy, I hadn't encountered a study that so thoroughly and consistently related them to one another, crafting a single historical narrative and detailing the religious, philosophical, and "scientific" interplay between the two tendencies. Does a good job of creating and utilizing a specific taxonomy of racist societies and regimes; very useful. The style is pretty dry, typical academic fare, but without drowning the reader in specifics. A criticism I would present is that Frederickson neglects the economic and political motives in the establishment of African slavery in the British American colonial period. I recognize that the scope of the book is the development, climax, and defeat of his "overtly racist regimes," I feel like the roots of white supremacy in the states bear description, are important to frame in this kind of thing. While he does a great job of describing the ways in which the kind of dehumanization that characterizes antisemitism and white supremacy are possible, he talks less about the motives of the regimes in question for codifying racist power dynamics. In short, its a study focusing on the pathology of racism.
March 10, 2022
Fredrickson seems tortured by the need to curtail the definition of racism to exclude most forms of human hatred and harm, and I'm not sure why.
September 8, 2024
Like a really long cliff notes about where racism originated from… oozing with academic verboseness that instills a perhaps pretentious impression unto the reader that is me (me)
Just heard about racism .. crazy stuff
Just heard about racism .. crazy stuff
December 11, 2008
Fredrickson’s definition includes “difference and power” as the major components of racism (p. 9). He argues that anything that lacks one or the other of these characteristics, however negative, could be called culturalism or prejudice but it would not be racism. He also argues that if the characteristics that elicit prejudice are not genetic and one is able to move from the persecuted group to the dominant group through any means, then it is also not truly racism. With this definition in mind Fredrickson goes on to provide a brief overview of racism in Western society. His overview primarily focuses on the grand scale of politics, religion, and laws associated with racial relations. He omits personal stories, and ground level impacts of racism in favor of understanding the long historical story of racism.
Fredrickson’s approach of looking at history from a broad, overarching scale offers a full picture, but it does so with the sacrifice of much detail. In the American context, this text leaves a great deal of the United States’ racial story untold. Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, and many other racial groups were were practically disregarded in this book. This is not necessarily a limit of historical studies in general, but it is a criticism of Fredrickson’s broad historical approach.
Fredrickson’s approach of looking at history from a broad, overarching scale offers a full picture, but it does so with the sacrifice of much detail. In the American context, this text leaves a great deal of the United States’ racial story untold. Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, and many other racial groups were were practically disregarded in this book. This is not necessarily a limit of historical studies in general, but it is a criticism of Fredrickson’s broad historical approach.
June 26, 2024
Read for class
September 8, 2024
I'd give this three-and-a-half stars if possible.
The book starts out very well. Its treatment of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Era was very convincing.
My problems started with the 18th Century, particularly when the author suggested that the worst thing that happened to Jews in this era was the writings of Voltaire. That floored me, because I thought there were significant acts of anti-Jewish violence in the Commonwealth of Poland in the 17th and 18th Centuries.
It turns out that the author largely avoided talking about Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire apart from one pretty superficial paragraph. This was odd because he wrote about "pogroms" against Jews in late Medieval Spain but never went on to say where the word "pogrom" came from or why it was coined. Likewise, he briefly mentioned "The Secret Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" in connection with Nazi thought but never explained where it came from.
Ultimately, I found the author's description of anti-Black racism far more convincing than his discussion of anti-Semitism, which struck me a incomplete and peculiar.
The book starts out very well. Its treatment of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Era was very convincing.
My problems started with the 18th Century, particularly when the author suggested that the worst thing that happened to Jews in this era was the writings of Voltaire. That floored me, because I thought there were significant acts of anti-Jewish violence in the Commonwealth of Poland in the 17th and 18th Centuries.
It turns out that the author largely avoided talking about Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire apart from one pretty superficial paragraph. This was odd because he wrote about "pogroms" against Jews in late Medieval Spain but never went on to say where the word "pogrom" came from or why it was coined. Likewise, he briefly mentioned "The Secret Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" in connection with Nazi thought but never explained where it came from.
Ultimately, I found the author's description of anti-Black racism far more convincing than his discussion of anti-Semitism, which struck me a incomplete and peculiar.
September 30, 2023
The author gives a more precise definition to racism and describes the continual process of how it came about in the “overtly racist regimes” of Nazi Germany, the American South, and South Africa. I found the author’s constant outlining of the transition into what he defined as racism to be very compelling, and it has helped me realize how to use more precise language around race. He also debunks the argument of racism being “natural” to heterogeneity.
August 15, 2014
A lot has been written about European anti-Semitism and American White Supremacism, but a comparative study of racism which takes into account both of its dominant manifestations is rare to find. Fredrickson's book manages to fill this gap by developing a conceptual framework of racism based on a comparison of Jim Crow America, Nazi Germany, and Apartheid South Africa. As a result, this book is more insightful and valuable than most works that dealt just with nation-specific manifestations of racism.
Refreshingly, Fredrickson also refrains from political rhetoric or blame-centered approaches, since, as he puts it:
"The responsibility of the historian or sociologist who studies racism is not to moralize and condemn but to understand this malignancy so that it can be more effectively treated, just as a medical researcher studying cancer does not moralize about it but searches for knowledge that might point the way to a cure."
With its concise form and clear language, "Racism: A Short History" also makes for a great introduction to the issue.
Refreshingly, Fredrickson also refrains from political rhetoric or blame-centered approaches, since, as he puts it:
"The responsibility of the historian or sociologist who studies racism is not to moralize and condemn but to understand this malignancy so that it can be more effectively treated, just as a medical researcher studying cancer does not moralize about it but searches for knowledge that might point the way to a cure."
With its concise form and clear language, "Racism: A Short History" also makes for a great introduction to the issue.
January 1, 2012
A comparative history of anti-Semitism and racism. Once the bibliography and appendix are taken out, it really is a "Short History" of racism, and I wouldn't have minded a bit more space to explore some of the arguments in a bit more detail as some generalisations creep in which I would rather were examined more closely.
August 1, 2020
This history of racism as an ideology is an impressively comprehensive but focused short academic work. My major takeaways were 1) Racism is always a "bastard" ideology, in that the ideology attaches itself to other societal problems like class conflict 2) Because of (1) , racism is always nationally specific, it has different variations in different countries 3) That racism as an established ideology is relatively new in human history and is not inherent or universal in human nature. I found all of these major points compelling and well supported by historical evidence. Especially compelling was the way Fredickson compares the similarities and differences between the development of racism in Germany that would eventually lead to the Nazi party (and the eventual discrediting of the idea of an overtly racist regime) and the institution of slavery that would lead to the Jim Crow era south. Although there are compelling similarities between the two countries, the differences are more interesting, for instance how racist policies towards Jews in Germany took advantage of the dispossession of the German middle classes related to industrialization while the post Civil War South's racism weaponized the dispossession of poor whites to enforce it's ideology.
I started reading this book to educate myself and remind myself of the historical context to our current US situations that are exposing systemic racism, and this book was excellent "framing" of the context of a lot of this oppression. The ending, about 21st century racism is short but compelling for the last decades in the US, I will leave this quote from page 150
" What characterizes many of the perpetrators of violence against the Other is social marginality...Alienation from the course of local or world development can provoke either racism or religious fanaticism depending on location and social situation. Grasping for one's identity in a world that threatens to reduce everyone who is not an elite to a low-paid worker or consumer of cheap, mass-produced commodities creates a hunger for meaning which can most easily be satisfied by the consciousness of race or religion"
I started reading this book to educate myself and remind myself of the historical context to our current US situations that are exposing systemic racism, and this book was excellent "framing" of the context of a lot of this oppression. The ending, about 21st century racism is short but compelling for the last decades in the US, I will leave this quote from page 150
" What characterizes many of the perpetrators of violence against the Other is social marginality...Alienation from the course of local or world development can provoke either racism or religious fanaticism depending on location and social situation. Grasping for one's identity in a world that threatens to reduce everyone who is not an elite to a low-paid worker or consumer of cheap, mass-produced commodities creates a hunger for meaning which can most easily be satisfied by the consciousness of race or religion"
May 14, 2017
Not quite what I expected it to be, this book defined racism much more narrowly than is typical in public discourse—a system in which a hierarchy is created between different groups by official means (i.e., laws and acts of government), in which groups are disadvantaged over characteristics which are considered immutable and unchanging. It's a thought-provoking and potentially useful definition for a term typically used in much broader, more vague senses, senses in which the author suggests that "xenophobia" is a more accurate term. As such, the book claims that the term really only applies to a few specific instances of history: primarily the US South up until the civil rights era, Germany from the nineteenth century to the end of WWII, and South Africa. I'm not necessarily convinced that this isn't overly restrictive; from my admittedly minor knowledge of the situation in the British Isles, I think one might argue what the Irish of the prior few centuries were subjected to racism by the definition of the book, and that there were examples in Asia as well, such as the Japanese with the Koreans.
The exploration of the origins and nature of bigotry against Africans and Jews was very interesting. While I'm still interested in reading more in depth on the topic, the book provided some insights into the origins of Africans as the primary victims of the slave trade in the last three centuries. Interesting to see how that fact, and some of the rationalizations for that came via Islamic cultures.
Also very interesting to learn of the peculiar nature of antisemitism in Germany. I hadn't been aware how the unique history of Germany made it a particularly fertile ground for the racism that lead ultimately to the holocaust. There was also a very interesting, of brief, exploration of how much culpability for the holocaust must be shared by Germany in general rather than just the maxi leaders.
An interesting (and, given the seeming rise of at least a strain of xenophobia in US and world politics, perhaps very timely) read.
The exploration of the origins and nature of bigotry against Africans and Jews was very interesting. While I'm still interested in reading more in depth on the topic, the book provided some insights into the origins of Africans as the primary victims of the slave trade in the last three centuries. Interesting to see how that fact, and some of the rationalizations for that came via Islamic cultures.
Also very interesting to learn of the peculiar nature of antisemitism in Germany. I hadn't been aware how the unique history of Germany made it a particularly fertile ground for the racism that lead ultimately to the holocaust. There was also a very interesting, of brief, exploration of how much culpability for the holocaust must be shared by Germany in general rather than just the maxi leaders.
An interesting (and, given the seeming rise of at least a strain of xenophobia in US and world politics, perhaps very timely) read.
July 5, 2020
I picked up this book because I wanted to learn a bit about the origins of racism and its dependence on scientific thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Mostly because some public discourse is obviously and manifestly bonkers, like claims that everybody was a racist in the sixteenth century, and I figured that reading one book by an esteemed scholar in the field is worth about a hundred ill-informed newspaper articles or opinion pieces.
So.
This short book traces the history of racism in the west from its beginnings in the late middle ages and early renaissance to its hitherto apex in the overtly racist regimes of Nazi Germany, the American South and South Africa.
The book can be fairly short as it assumes that the reader has a working knowledge of European history, the history of the new world, some knowledge of South Africa's history and a decent overview of World history. It also has a quite narrow definition of racism, making it possible to remove lots of lamentable theories about ethnicity and culture from the curriculum and focus on the most horrible manifestations of racialized thought.
Fredrickson defines racism as an ideology that directly sustains (or proposes) a permanent, unbridgeable racial group hierarchy founded upon the laws of nature or decrees of God/gods/spririts/blood magic. And traces the history and justification both in scientific literature and in (mostly German) anti-rationalism.
I thought the book was excellent, on point and well referenced without it disturbing the reading too much. A well spent afternoon.
So.
This short book traces the history of racism in the west from its beginnings in the late middle ages and early renaissance to its hitherto apex in the overtly racist regimes of Nazi Germany, the American South and South Africa.
The book can be fairly short as it assumes that the reader has a working knowledge of European history, the history of the new world, some knowledge of South Africa's history and a decent overview of World history. It also has a quite narrow definition of racism, making it possible to remove lots of lamentable theories about ethnicity and culture from the curriculum and focus on the most horrible manifestations of racialized thought.
Fredrickson defines racism as an ideology that directly sustains (or proposes) a permanent, unbridgeable racial group hierarchy founded upon the laws of nature or decrees of God/gods/spririts/blood magic. And traces the history and justification both in scientific literature and in (mostly German) anti-rationalism.
I thought the book was excellent, on point and well referenced without it disturbing the reading too much. A well spent afternoon.
August 28, 2023
A concise look at the socio-political formation of racism before it dawned its nefarious moniker. The late Dr. Fredrickson walks us through the dialectic nature of exclusive racism versus inclusive racism, namely, racism against people of a different race than yourself vs. people who share the same phenotypical features as your community. We witness this social phenomenon in historical events like the Rwandan genocide and the holocaust. Both atrocities happened to people who looked and shared in many ways the same culture and language as their perpetrators.
Dr. Fredrickson also walks us through the history of racist ideas and prejudices enacted and accepted by religion, namely, European Christianity that sought to understand itself not merely on a religious stance against Muslims in Northern Africa and in parts of Southern Spain but also in light of visible difference not only to distinguish the two or more but to disparage the difference.
It is true that we have come a long way in race relations, seeing the demise of overt racist acts of violence and blatant de jure discriminatory practices. The problem is that racism folds and molds to survive every generation, morphing into covert forms of prejudice, discrimination, and eventually, through second and third-hand experiences, the devaluation and extermination of minorities.
A wholesome book for anyone interested in the intellectual, pseudo-scientific, religious, and social formation of race and racism and its many forms in these last 500-600 years.
Dr. Fredrickson also walks us through the history of racist ideas and prejudices enacted and accepted by religion, namely, European Christianity that sought to understand itself not merely on a religious stance against Muslims in Northern Africa and in parts of Southern Spain but also in light of visible difference not only to distinguish the two or more but to disparage the difference.
It is true that we have come a long way in race relations, seeing the demise of overt racist acts of violence and blatant de jure discriminatory practices. The problem is that racism folds and molds to survive every generation, morphing into covert forms of prejudice, discrimination, and eventually, through second and third-hand experiences, the devaluation and extermination of minorities.
A wholesome book for anyone interested in the intellectual, pseudo-scientific, religious, and social formation of race and racism and its many forms in these last 500-600 years.
October 14, 2025
My first book of the Fall 2025 semester: George Fredrickson’s Racism: A Short History.
I found Fredrickson’s summary of the developmental steps European cultures took from the early sixteenth century to the height of racial ideology in the 1940s both intriguing and highly accessible.
That said, I found the book’s scope somewhat limited. Fredrickson focuses almost exclusively on Western contexts, giving little attention to the evolution of racist structures outside Europe and its colonial extensions. There is minimal discussion of discrimination within the Indian subcontinent through the caste system, of the racialization faced by Asian Americans during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or of the ethnic whitening movements in Latin America. While one could argue that the scale and historical consequences of these issues pale in comparison of racism in the West, such as the persecution of Jewish communities in Nazi Germany or the oppression of Black populations in the United States and South Africa, leaving out these other regions limits the global understanding of racism as a human phenomenon. I wish it had expanded its comparative lens just slightly further.
Despite my view on the books shortcomings, I believe its analysis of racism in the 21st century still stands strong in the year 2025, and that makes the book worth reading for anyone.
I found Fredrickson’s summary of the developmental steps European cultures took from the early sixteenth century to the height of racial ideology in the 1940s both intriguing and highly accessible.
That said, I found the book’s scope somewhat limited. Fredrickson focuses almost exclusively on Western contexts, giving little attention to the evolution of racist structures outside Europe and its colonial extensions. There is minimal discussion of discrimination within the Indian subcontinent through the caste system, of the racialization faced by Asian Americans during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or of the ethnic whitening movements in Latin America. While one could argue that the scale and historical consequences of these issues pale in comparison of racism in the West, such as the persecution of Jewish communities in Nazi Germany or the oppression of Black populations in the United States and South Africa, leaving out these other regions limits the global understanding of racism as a human phenomenon. I wish it had expanded its comparative lens just slightly further.
Despite my view on the books shortcomings, I believe its analysis of racism in the 21st century still stands strong in the year 2025, and that makes the book worth reading for anyone.
April 10, 2025
Pretty good. He sees racism as the following: 'we might say that racism exists when one ethnic group or historical collectivity dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate another on the basis of differences that it believes are hereditary and unalterable.'
This does seem to be a decent working definition, and his examination of the Middle Ages was fascinating. Odd how Germany, anti-Jewish at the time, developed such a cult to St Moritz.
I think, however, he is wrong in saying that the anti-Jewish sentiment in the Middle Ages was not racist, simply because it thought that baptism could redeem Jews. Unbaptised Jews bore the responsibility for the death of Christ, and were seen as having undesirable differences. That they had a belief that baptism was powerful enough to sanctify 'even' Jews doesn't mean that anti-Jewish sentiment was just opposition to the Jewish faith. I think there was something seen in blood descent at this time. Perhaps this wasn't as developed as later racism, but it wasn't just religious difference. The picture is a bit more complicated than he allows.
He is right, however, in saying that Northern Ireland isn't an issue of race, I'd say.
He was, I think, wrong in asserting that there was no racism in the Classical world - cf. St Moses the Black.
This does seem to be a decent working definition, and his examination of the Middle Ages was fascinating. Odd how Germany, anti-Jewish at the time, developed such a cult to St Moritz.
I think, however, he is wrong in saying that the anti-Jewish sentiment in the Middle Ages was not racist, simply because it thought that baptism could redeem Jews. Unbaptised Jews bore the responsibility for the death of Christ, and were seen as having undesirable differences. That they had a belief that baptism was powerful enough to sanctify 'even' Jews doesn't mean that anti-Jewish sentiment was just opposition to the Jewish faith. I think there was something seen in blood descent at this time. Perhaps this wasn't as developed as later racism, but it wasn't just religious difference. The picture is a bit more complicated than he allows.
He is right, however, in saying that Northern Ireland isn't an issue of race, I'd say.
He was, I think, wrong in asserting that there was no racism in the Classical world - cf. St Moses the Black.
March 26, 2018
Fredrickson brilliantly breaks down the history of racism, from its arrival in the modern world in Spain to the current struggles of African-Americans. In its early days, many used racism as a justification for slavery. The Curse of Haam, was a story tarnished skin taken from the old testament and randomly applied to the people of West Africa.
Fredickson separates two kinds of racism, that of White Supremacy (inclusion) and of Antisemitism (exclusion). He details how these grew over time from the pogroms of the 12th and 13th century, to the 'limpieza de sangre' towards moriscos and conversos in 16th century Spain, to the popular science of Eugenics (starting in England and then spreading the US and Germany). Fredrickson demonstrates how the rise of German Nationalism contributed to the rise of exclusionist policies and eventually to the racism of the Third Reich.
The ideology of social Darwinism spread across the world in 18th and 19 centuries and its effect on modern society is still seen today.
Fredickson separates two kinds of racism, that of White Supremacy (inclusion) and of Antisemitism (exclusion). He details how these grew over time from the pogroms of the 12th and 13th century, to the 'limpieza de sangre' towards moriscos and conversos in 16th century Spain, to the popular science of Eugenics (starting in England and then spreading the US and Germany). Fredrickson demonstrates how the rise of German Nationalism contributed to the rise of exclusionist policies and eventually to the racism of the Third Reich.
The ideology of social Darwinism spread across the world in 18th and 19 centuries and its effect on modern society is still seen today.
November 4, 2022
An excellent, compact, well-articulated, and succinct summary of racism. The author treats the topic of defining racism throughout the book and expounds upon the fact that there is no proper historical precedent for racism in the ancient world. Racism developed shortly before, and throughout the period of the enlightenment, and found its most crystallized realization in the modern era in three independent, state-run, institutionalized forms, disparate though related in intriguing ways: white supremacy in the American South, white supremacy and apartheid in South Africa, and antisemitism in Germany and the Holocaust. Fredrickson concludes, again summarizing his definition: "...racism exists when one ethnic group or historical collectivity dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate another on the basis of differences that it believes are hereditary and unalterable."
January 27, 2025
I loved this book. I woulda thought Racism had existed throughout the beginning of time only to find out it was a manmade construct or ideology. Never understood the correlation between religion, history and historiography. I realized it's important although some people "sticks and stones may break my bones and words will never hurt" mindset it wise to avoid being a scapegoat because that affects how people treat and interact with you. I mean look at what happened to a certain group of people who did absolutely nothing wrong and because of their differing beliefs and their tendency to ignore groups becoming more jealous and insecure of their persistence and success.
August 14, 2018
What is racism? When did it first appear in human history? What forms has it taken throughout the world? These are the general questions George Fredrickson attempts to answer in Racism: A Short History. This was my exposure to scholarly literature dealing with the concept of race, and it helped me see how the idea has been and is being engaged by social scientists and historians. I look forward to reading more from Fredrickson and others in his field as I attempt to put the pieces together for myself.
July 28, 2020
Es un libro muy bien escrito para alguien que comienza a sumergirse en la historia del racismo, y en el camino evolutivo que el racismo tomó en el curso de la historia. Si investigar y entender el curso del racismo es algo que le interesa, empezaría aquí. Ofrece una buena base para iniciar su investigación, ya que incluye numerosas referencias citadas, así como información que puede explorar por su cuenta.
December 12, 2020
A decent overview of the specifics of racism, as this author defines it, as distinct from religious bigotry or cultural exceptionalism. Ibram Kendi would probably disagree with him. Pretty quick read, but far from the best, most informative, or most original book I've read on the topic.
Mostly read it because it's been sitting on a shelf in my house since I bought it at the Holocaust museum in DC a dozen years ago. And it's pretty short.
Mostly read it because it's been sitting on a shelf in my house since I bought it at the Holocaust museum in DC a dozen years ago. And it's pretty short.
March 2, 2021
The title says it all. An excellent study. I especially like the way he begins with the anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages and then does a careful comparison of the three fully racist states in world history: Nazi Germany, South Africa and the American South. I do wonder how, or whether, his analysis would respond to the issue of Institutional racism, which does the work of legal racism, but without direct reference to race.
March 19, 2021
I read this with my school's DEI book club, which I'm so glad I joined because I don't think I would have read this book on my own. I found it really informative from a historical perspective and I learned a lot about how racist ideals were fostered in different parts of the world. I gave it three stars because it's a rather difficult read—I highly recommend reading this book with another person or with a group so that you can discuss the topics and ideas that are brought to light.
June 17, 2024
Este o carte foarte bine scrisă pentru cineva care dorește să exploreze istoria rasismului și parcursul evolutiv pe care rasismul l-a luat de-a lungul istoriei. Dacă cercetarea și înțelegerea rasismului sunt aspecte care te interesează, recomand să începi de aici. Cartea oferă o bază solidă pentru începerea educării, deoarece include numeroase referințe și informații pe care le poți explora în continuare pe cont propriu.
April 13, 2018
As someone who does not have an extensive historical knowledge, this book was difficult to read at times. However, the way Fredrickson presents his ideas are quite thought-provoking. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who may not believe racism is still a societal issue, or for people who wish to have a greater knowledge and another resource in their toolbelt of academic opinion.
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