George M. Fredrickson - Racism

RACISM

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD

GEORGE M. FREDRICKSON

A Short
History

with a new foreword by Albert M. Camarillo

Copyright 2002 by Princeton University Press

Foreword to the Princeton Classics Edition Copyright
2015 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

All Rights Reserved

First Princeton Classics edition printing, with a new foreword by Albert M. Camarillo, 2015

Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-16705-3

Printed on acid-free paper.

press.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For

Donald Fleming,

mentor and

friend

Racism: A Short History, published in 2002, was among the last of the many books written by George M. Fredrickson in a long and distinguished career. One of the great historians of his generation and an internationally renowned author, Fredricksona dear friend and colleague of mine for over twenty-five yearscould not have written Racism early in his career. This seminal overview, a history about shifting ideologies and practices that hinged on ideas about difference and power and the incalculable misery they afflicted on the human condition through the ages, was the product and synthesis of a lifetime of research, teaching, and thinking about the origins of racism. For more than four decades, Fredricksons major contributions on the topic influenced two generations of students and colleagues alike. I remember well, when I was a new graduate student in 197071 with a keen interest in the history of race relations in America, that my understanding about the intellectual foundations of racial thought was deeply influenced by Fredricksons second book, The Black Image in the White Mind (1971). And I, like others who were curious about racism as a transnational phenomenon, found in his third major book, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History (1981), path breaking perspectives on how ideologies of difference based on a white/black paradigm created societies where race defined ones life chances from birth to death.

Fredrickson joined the Stanford Department of History faculty in 1984, and a few years later we began a decade long collaboration, co-teaching a course on race in the American experience. I viewed firsthand how Fredrickson continued to refine his thinking about race as an idea: its origins, continuities, and changes across time and space. Racism: A Short History was, thus, the culmination of Fredricksons lifelong intellectual journey as a historian in pursuit of understanding how ideas about race evolved and infected modern western societies. The publication of the Princeton Classics edition of Racism is testament to the durable intellectual contributions made by George M. Fredrickson in the study of race and its byproducts.

Although I first met Fredrickson when he was a Northwestern University professor visiting Stanford as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 197778, it was not until he joined the Stanford faculty that I learned how his personal experiences with race relations were intimately linked to his academic interests. Born in Connecticut but raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, he attended Harvard University for both his undergraduate and graduate studies. Fredrickson was among the hundreds of white college students who traveled to the South to support civil rights efforts during some of the most violent years of struggle for African Americans. Later, as a young faculty member at Northwestern, he supported the rights of students to demonstrate peacefully against the war in Southeast Asia and was a strong advocate for the development of Black Studies on campus. When I learned about this personal background, I came to understand better the passion that he brought to the study of race, an intellectual passion shaped in part by his personal commitment to racial equality.

Fredricksons reputation as one of the premier comparative historians of raceand comparative history in generalwas cemented with the publication of White Supremacy, which won the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1982. Anchored by his masterful understanding of slavery and white/black relations in the American South, Fredrickson ventured into South African history to produce a brilliant comparative analysis. With great clarity and insight, White Supremacy is a model for comparative historians to follow. Fredricksons book illuminates how different national histories and circumstances, the role of federal governments and their institutional policies, framed by ideologies about racial differences, combined to form two distinctive systems of race relations across the Atlantic. White Supremacy was the springboard in Fredricksons continuing search for understanding the origins of racial thought beyond national, cultural, and religious boundaries.

In 1988, seventeen of Fredricksons essays and articles, most of which were written during the previous twenty years and based on research for The Black Image in the White Mind and White Supremacy, were published as The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality. This collection delves deeper into some issues not fully explored in his two previous books and, in the authors words, was intended to provide commentary on other historians interpretations so as to engage dialogue and debate among scholars [because] it is not only healthy but also indispensable to the historical enterprise. The book was, he said, my contribution to the ongoing discussion of the role of race in American history. Again, Fredricksons scholarship reflected a personal concern for social inequality, whether in the U.S., South Africa, or elsewhere. Placing racial inequality in the broader context of class inequality framed by Marxian analyses, Fredrickson stated in the introduction of the book both his theoretical stance and his personal abhorrence for racism under any regime:

I regard racial injustice as a distinctive evil, more heinous than the class inequality found in liberal capitalist societies. What occurred in the American South during the era of slavery and segregation, what is occurring now in South Africa, andto take the extreme case of racism carried to its logical conclusionwhat happened in Germany during World War II make it hard to deny that demoting other people from the ranks of humanity on grounds of race or ethnicity, and treating them accordingly, is a sin of unique and horrendous character. (The Arrogance of Race, 7)

Obviously, the death knell of apartheid in South Africa weighed heavily on his mind in 1988. The end of this system of racial inequality in the early 1990s prompted Fredrickson to broaden his analysis of racism as a concept and as a system of social relations. So, too, did teaching courses at Stanford University on comparative studies of race and ethnicity in America and sharing ideas with colleagues whose work also focused on race and ethnic relations. By co-teaching courses with him throughout the 1990s and co-sponsoring a faculty seminar, I witnessed firsthand how Fredrickson expanded the scope and chronology for understanding racism and its various effects on groups in the U.S. and elsewhere.