Racism In The Modern World

Emphasizing the global nature of racism, this volume brings together historians from various regional specializations to explore this phenomenon from comparative and transnational perspectives. The essays shed light on how racial ideologies and practices developed, changed, and spread in Europe, Asia, the Near East, Australia, and Africa, focusing on processes of transfer, exchange, appropriation, and adaptation. To what extent, for example, were racial beliefs of Western origin? Did similar belief systems emerge in non-Western societies independently of Western influence? And how did these societies adopt and adapt Western racial beliefs once they were exposed to them? Up to this point, the few monographs or edited collections that exist only provide students of the history of racism with tentative answers to these questions. More importantly, the authors of these studies tend to ignore transnational processes of exchange and transfer. Yet, as this volume shows, these are crucial to an understanding of the diffusion of racial belief systems around the globe.

Emphasizing the global nature of racism, this volume brings together historians from various regional specializations to explore this phenomenon from comparative and transnational perspectives. The essays shed light on how racial ideologies and practices developed, changed, and spread in Europe, Asia, the Near East, Australia, and Africa, focusing on processes of transfer, exchange, appropriation, and adaptation. To what extent, for example, were racial beliefs of Western origin? Did similar belief systems emerge in non-Western societies independently of Western influence? And how did these societies adopt and adapt Western racial beliefs once they were exposed to them? Up to this point, the few monographs or edited collections that exist only provide students of the history of racism with tentative answers to these questions. More importantly, the authors of these studies tend to ignore transnational processes of exchange and transfer. Yet, as this volume shows, these are crucial to an understanding of the diffusion of racial belief systems around the globe.

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.

An innovative, substantial intervention in critical race theory, this book brings together an impressive roster of thinkers to trace the question of race in modern philosophical inquiry and explore its influence on contemporary philosophy.

This text offers a provocative explanation of the force and place of race in modern history, showing that race and nation have a linked history. The author seeks to show the close historical connection of race and nation as each interrelates with the other in shaping and carrying social and institutional practices over many centuries.

Is it possible to speak of western racism before the eighteenth century? The term 'racism' is normally only associated with theories, which first appeared in the eighteenth century, about inherent biological differences that made one group superior to another. Here, however, leading historians argue that racism can be traced back to the attitudes of the ancient Greeks to their Persian enemies and that it was adopted, adjusted and re-formulated by Europeans right through until the dawn of the Enlightenment. From Greek teachings on environmental determinism and heredity, through medieval concepts of physiognomy, down to the crystallization of attitudes to Indians, Blacks, Jews and Gypsies in the early modern era, they analyse the various routes by which racist ideas travelled before maturing into murderous ideologies in the modern western world. In so doing this book offers a major reassessment of the place of racism in pre-modern European thought.

'Race' and Racism examines the origins and development of racism in North America. It addresses the inception and persistence of the concept of 'race' and discusses the biology of human variance, addressing the fossil record of human evolution, the relationship between creationism and science, population genetics, 'race'-based medicine, and other related issues. The book explores the diverse ways in which people in a variety of cultures have perceived, categorized, and defined one another without reference to any concept of 'race.' It follows the history of American racism through slavery, the perceptions and treatment of Native Americans, Jim Crow laws, attitudes toward Irish and Southern European immigrants, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the civil rights era, and numerous other topics.

Bowser, is a unique and valuable resource for students and scholars of race relations. The book's contributors come from a wide range of backgrounds, including anthropology, classics, sociology, political science, communications, and history. They examine racism and anti-racism through the historical and cultural lenses of different world settings, including Europe, South America, Africa, America, and the Caribbean.

The concept of race as a rough division of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) has a long and complicated history. The word race itself is modern and was used in the sense of "nation, ethnic group" during the 16th to 19th centuries and acquired its modern meaning in the field of physical anthropology only from the mid-19th century. Several social and political developments that occurred at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century led to the transformation in the discourse of race. Political theorists have collectively failed to arrive at a coherent and consistent definition of the term "race". Terms such as "negro", "white", "African", "Asian", "black", are often provided without an accompanying explanation or justification for their usage. Typical "histories" of "racism" tend to betray a general incapacity to visualize or bring to life the non-racialist or pre-racialist character of societies in the "Old World". Moreover, political psychologists that do address "racism" tend to contextualize this phenomenon using passively-constructed language that presents scenarios of an unfortunate racist political behavior motivated by antipathy. In response, this book advances the following claims: (a) before the advent of "modern racism", around the globe, and in the geographic spaces of "western Eurasia", the range of "morphological" characteristics was heterogeneous and reflected the cyclical explorations, invasions, and colonization from peoples who were home to what is now known as "Africa", the "Near East", and "Asia" into those spaces; (b) the term "race" has undergone specific and radically transformative phases in which its meanings have been re-constituted from mere "kinship" to "meta- ancestry", "morphology", "anthropology" and "bio-genetics"; (c) the contemporary meaning of "race" is best conceptualized as a mosaic of constructed micro-differences (e.g. social relations, cognitive-linguistic framework, appearance, ancestry, and self- identification) reified as the markers of intrinsic "racial" distinction, which the subject measures according to a weighted-scale that she uses to ultimately assign self, group, and other membership in one (or more) "racial" group(s); (d) racial power entails a nexus of power-knowledge whereby authority is enabled to exercise political power to confer greater enabled agency to the social agent by discourses developed by credentialed "experts" working within a field of authoritative knowledge that objectifies that social agent as occupying a subject position that is imbued with empowerment.