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.”