Western Racism Research Articles

Navigating 'race' and challenging racisms in the Academy: the career geographies of a German UK sociologist

ABSTRACT This article reflects critically on growing societal controversies about the role of racism in Western society and discusses why and how racism and white normativity should be addressed and challenged more prominently in higher education. Reflecting on my own career geography in universities in the UK and Ireland and my positionality as a white German researcher in the UK, I draw on a conceptual frame of Critical Whiteness Studies, historical sociology and racism analysis, postcolonialism and intersectionality to set out the epistemic and ethical gains to be had of a historically grounded intersectional analysis of racism. I show how key discussions and historical insights in the field can help us to more fully grasp and challenge the foundations of racism, and that of racialised inequalities in Western society. I argue that we need to develop a broader understanding of the problematic historical legacy of Western racism and more critical, global perspectives in higher education (and beyond) accounting for and reaching beyond Eurocentric white normative accounts of modern history. A critically informed education is key to achieve this.

Globalizing dissent: the Soviet response to the Truman doctrine at the United Nations and the (Re)making of global governance at the end of ideology

ABSTRACT This article considers the role of dissent in the making and remaking of contemporary international relations. The immediate aftermath of World War II was a period of interregnum. Prior security paradigms were exhausted while the three major political ideologies of conservatism, liberalism, and left radicalism competed around the world. The creation of the United Nations in 1945 was meant to facilitate the creation of a new global governance model for the sake of peace. However, when in 1947 U.S. President Harry S. Truman made a speech to Congress in which he inaugurated a unilateral foreign policy doctrine premised on Soviet containment, he escalated ideological differences into security concerns. The Soviet Union responded by intensifying their investment in the U.N. and by developing a rhetorical playbook meant to aid smaller nations and oppressed peoples in challenging Western racism and colonialism. I examine the Soviets’ dissent at the United Nations to highlight (1) how dissent figures differently across political ideological paradigms; (2) the connection between dissent and institutional forums in the development of global security models; and (3) the role of dissent as a form of material rhetoric that makes possible the creation of novel political alliances.

Decolonising Sinology: on Sinology’s weaponisation of the discourse of race

ABSTRACT The previous generation of Sinologists were of the overwhelming consensus that race consciousness did not exist in pre-modern China. However, in recent decades there has been a revision of this consensus. This paper frames this shift in terms of Sinology’s complicity with white supremacy, imperialism and the military-industrial-academic complex. Contemporary Sinology sets itself up as exposing a colonial mentality in pre-modern China. The irony is that it is contemporary Sinology which is complicit with white supremacy and itself is in need of decolonisation. This paper will analyse the most prominent example of this sea-shift in the Sinological consensus on race in China: Frank Dikötter’s The Discourse of Race in Modern China. That such scholarship, deficient in the most basic scholarly standards, was overwhelmingly feted upon its publication, continues to be cited as an authority and to receive inordinate recognition reveals Western academia’s problematic attitudes towards China and the issue of racism. This paper will show how all of the above phenomena can be understood in terms of the “epistemology of ignorance.” By misappropriating the discourse of the critical philosophy of race, Sinology’s epistemology of ignorance universalises Western racism. Sinology has weaponised the discourse of race.

Scientist or Racist? The Racialized Memory War Over Monuments to Carl Linnaeus in Sweden During the Black Lives Matter Summer of 2020

This is a study of the Swedish debate on statues and monuments to the world-famous Swedish natural scientist Carl Linnaeus that took place during the Black Lives Matter movement breakthrough in the summer of 2020. The purpose is to examine how understandings of race, racism, identity, and history were articulated in the debate. The empirical material consists of Twitter posts and newspaper editorials, which we approach through thematic analysis complemented with discourse analysis of illustrative examples and excerpts. Theoretically, we conceptualize the debate as a case of a Swedish racialized memory war. The results show that discourse participants constructed the terms of the debate as a matter of being “for” or “against” Linnaeus’ legacy, and consequently as a matter of being for or against science, reason, progress, and a supposedly non-ideological historiography, rather than as a matter of qualitatively renegotiating how we selectively remember and celebrate historical persons and legacies, and formulate tendentious narratives of the past that serve present agendas. In this memory war, discourse participants mainly representing the white majority population of Sweden mobilized a defense of a “canonized” understanding of Linnaeus’ legacy on the editorial pages of the Swedish newspapers and on Twitter. This defense, we argue, supports an ongoing effort to absolve Swedes of any substantial complicity in European and Western racism and colonialism. In effect, what is defended is a white-washed use and understanding of history – a status quo that largely remains unchallenged in Sweden.

Nihonjinron and depictions of racial foreigners: reporting on black people in Asahi Shimbun (2001–2010)

We examine the Japanese-language newspaper Asahi Shimbun for its reporting on Black people in Japan and the United States from 2001–2010, a time when Japan was forced to boost immigration. While a response to major labor shortages, increased diversity required Japan to rethink its relationship with racial others, among whom Blacks have long been unique in Japanese history. While the newspaper’s narratives in stories of Japan and the United States had overlapping themes, the emphasis differed with national context. Its reporting on the U.S. characterized Black-Japanese relations as being racially aligned, suggesting Japanese have a parallel set of experiences with Western racism; reporting also described the U.S. failing miserably in its treatment of African Americans. Reporting on Blacks in Japan used black cultural artifacts as a tool to understand Japanese life. On occasion, the “Ambiguous Foreigner” appears when referencing Afro-Japanese families or Africans in Japan. The idea of Japanese racism holds little credence in reporting, but when evident a remedy was quickly and responsively provided. Asahi bolsters the idea of Japanese exceptionalism/Nihonjinron identity vis-a-vis the U.S. and portrays Japan as a model of a modern, post-racist nation.

African women in search of global identity: An exploration of feminism and Afropolitanism in Chimamanda Adichie’s works

Abstract Many variants of feminism have been branded over time and that has given feminism a multiple identity. One of the new revelations of feminism in recent times is “Afropolitan Feminism”, a branch of African feminism conceived in this research to deal with the story of African women in the homeland and the Diaspora trying to assume the status of world citizens (Metropolites) to de-emphasize their origins. What is the nature of Afropolitan Feminism? What is the link between Feminism and Afropolitanism? To what extent do Adichie’s characters show the attributes of Afropolitans? This paper illuminates the concepts of feminism and Afropolitanism and the latter’s traits in Adichie’s characters in Americanah and The Thing Around Your Neck. It deals with Diaspora issues and the way African women in literary fictions try to stem the effects of global maladies like African patriarchy, Western racism and sexism. The paper further discusses social awareness and feminist tendencies displayed by the characters. It ends by noting that feminism which assumes the dimension of Afropolitanism in Adichie’s works is a becoming trend rather than a fixed norm.

Origen of Alexandria and the History of Racism as a Theological Problem

Abstract Despite important work on the Greco-Roman antecedents of modern racism, very limited attention has been paid to early Christian literature in this connection. This is remarkable not least because modern Western racism took shape initially in a European context heavily influenced by Christianity. The present essay contributes to addressing this lacuna by analysing statements about ‘other’ ethnicities in the work of Origen of Alexandria, one of the most important thinkers of the first three centuries ce. It argues that Origen defends a number of positions that exhibit substantial similarities with later racist modes of thinking. Earlier scholarly accounts that portray Origen as a champion of human equality and as engaged in anti-racist efforts therefore cannot stand up to scrutiny. Origen disparages certain ethnic groups and develops arguments that connect ethnic identity and geographical location with various degrees of sinfulness. His work offers clear evidence that theories of ethnic inferiority have a long history within the Christian matrix that stretches considerably beyond the modern and medieval periods.

Racialising global relations: the Rwandan genocide and the ethics of representation

ABSTRACTAt a time when the historical experience of the Rwandan genocide continues to be invoked to imagine and affirm international responsibility for the suffering of others, this article examines one way in which this event has been made to mean. Through a critical reading of Hotel Rwanda (a feature film) and Shake Hands with the Devil (a memoir), the article examines how the Rwandan genocide has been framed as an event of ‘white’ Western racism towards ‘black’ African injury. Without disputing the veracity of this explanatory framework, this article interrogates its representational politics and ethics. I problematise its continued use of inherently discriminatory racial categories, demonstrate its Eurocentric nature and call for a mode of understanding the ethical significance of the Rwandan genocide that is not limited to an already existing global relation between suffering ‘black’ bodies and potential ‘white’ saviours. In critiquing these texts and this discursive framework, my aim is to enable ways of coming to terms with the genocide that can accommodate the complex connections that do and may exist between non-Rwandans and the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Blackness the Color of Red: Negotiating Race at the US Legation in Riga, Latvia, 1922–33

This article draws on the archival records of the United States Consulate in Riga, Latvia, during the interwar period and other primary sources to reconstruct the rites of passage by African American citizens of the USA traveling to and from the Soviet Union. In the absence of established diplomatic relations between the USA and the USSR (until 1933), the US legation in Riga served as a popular entry point for American tourists and contract workers attracted by the mystique and job opportunities of the first socialist state. The consular records of the US legation in Riga contain a wealth of materials related to some of these travels. In the course of formal interviews with consular officials, US citizens, including the minority of black visitors, revealed remarkable details of their Soviet odysseys. The archival records bring to life a unique story of ‘race tourism’ by African Americans to the first socialist state and thus provide a rare insight into the early Soviet society and its accepted attitudes toward racial difference; and such accounts are usually juxtaposed with an eviscerating critique of North American and Western racism during the interwar period.

The first Ethiopians: the image of Africa and Africans in the early Mediterranean world

First Ethiopians explores the images of Africa and Africans that evolved in ancient Egypt, in classical Greece and imperial Rome, in the early Mediterranean world, and in the early domains of Christianity. Inspired by curiosity regarding the origins of racism in southern Africa, Malvern van Wyk Smith consulted a wide range of sources: from rock art to classical travel writing; from the pre-dynastic African beginnings of Egyptian and Nubian civilisations to Greek and Roman perceptions of Africa; from Khoisan cultural expressions to early Christian conceptions of Africa and its people as 'demonic'; from Aristotelian climatology to medieval cartography; and, from the geo-linguistic history of Africa to the most recent revelations regarding the genome profile of the continent's peoples. The research led to a startling proposition: western racism has its roots in Africa itself, notably in late New-Kingdom Egypt as its ruling elites sought to distance Egyptian civilisation from its African origins. Kushite Nubians, founders of Napata and Meroe who, in the eighth century BC, furnished the Black rulers of the twenty-fifth Dynasty in Egypt, adopted and adapted such dynastic discriminations in order to differentiate their own 'superior' Meroitic civilisation from the world of 'other Ethiopians'. In due course, Archaic Greeks, who began to arrive in the Nile Delta in the seventh century BC, internalised these distinctions in terms of Homer's identification of 'two Ethiopias', an eastern and a western, to create a racialised (and racist) discourse of 'worthy' and 'savage Ethiopians'. Such conceptions would inspire virtually all subsequent Roman and early medieval thinking about Africa and Africans, and become foundational in European thought. The book is richly illustrated and concludes with a survey of the special place that Aksumite Ethiopia - later Abyssinia - has held in both European and African conceptual worlds as the site of 'worthy Ethiopia', as well as in the wider context of discourses of ethnicity and race.

Capitalist houses, queer homes: National belonging and transgressive erotics in My Beautiful Laundrette

South Asian diasporic subjects have dealt with experiences of ‘home’ in various ways: ranging from the ostensibly failed assimilations of racialized subjects in their new homes to the nostalgia and trauma of exile felt in relation to former homelands. Most conceptualizations of home, in their privileging of racial formations that underpin Western racism, have elided questions of (homo)sexuality. This reading of My Beautiful Laundrette evinces the ways in which queer South Asian Diasporas resist the interpellative praises of the British nation‐state during the years of Margaret Thatcher. I argue that the film depicts, on the one hand, hegemonic homes that expound classist and heteronormative ideals supported by neoliberal capitalism. On the other hand, the characters Omar and Tania act as queer agents whose non‐heteronormative sexual practices trouble such exclusive homes, and thus create new ‘home’ spaces for belonging. This paper contributes to queer post‐colonial studies, ‘third’ world feminism, and diasporic cultural studies by examining, for a historical perspective, how Kureishi's queer characters resist the interpellative demands of the nation‐state, capitalism, and the materialist family.

"Black Gentleman as Good as White": A Comparative Analysis of African American and Australian Aboriginal Political Protests, 1830-1865

A large body of so-called scientific literature appeared in the 19th century categorizing the world's various colored races as inferior to people of European descent. (1) In two of the most unlikely of places, the United States and British colonial Australia, educated men of color produced remarkably similar critiques of 19th century racial science. In the United States, for example, an anonymous black author articulated the views of many African Americans when he declared in 1867: am not ashamed of my color, nor of my race. ... I remain among, and one of my people; my hopes are based on their elevation, and I expect to rise as they ascend by the power of their own institutions, and to show what a black man may become as a black man, developed on the basis of his own individual and independent life. (2) Similarly, Charles Never, a mission-educated Aboriginal man in British colonial Australia, registered his opposition to 19th century racism. Charles Never stated his case succinctly: like to be a gentleman. Black gentleman as good as white. (3) Implicit in both of these statements was a sense of the dignity and self-respect that Western racism attempted to take from African American and Australian Aboriginal people. While U.S. African Americans endured the hardships of racial slavery in the antebellum South, those in northern states confronted the indignity of disenfranchisement, social marginalization, and economic hardship. (4) In comparison, Australian Aborigines suffered the dispossession of their land, frontier violence at the hands of white settlers, and the heartbreaking dissolution of families through the abduction of children and concubinage of Aboriginal women at the hands of white men. (5) In response to these atrocities, the anonymous African American author and the Australian Aborigine Charles Never asserted their basic human equality with white Americans and colonial Australians. In their minds the qualities associated with Western civilization--the rule of law, upward economic mobility, moral refinement, and cultural accomplishment--were not the sole preserve of white Americans or British Australians, but universal principles attainable to all of humanity. Without losing sight of their particular social identity in the racialized milieus of antebellum United States and British colonial Australia, African American and Australian Aboriginal leaders insisted that the people they represented were as capable as whites of cultivating civilized habits and social practices. Historical comparisons between the United States and British colonial Australia are few and far between. This is a surprising historiographical omission given that both the United States and colonial Australia shared intellectual, economic, and political connections with Britain and each other during the 19th century. (6) For the most part, historians have focused on comparisons of the United States with South American and Caribbean nations, or of the United States and South Africa. (7) But a historical comparison of African American and Australian Aboriginal leaders makes sense for at least two historical reasons. First, early 19th century white Americans and British Australians viewed African Americans and Australian Aborigines as two branches of an inferior Negroid race. For example, the American ethnologist Charles Pickering described the Aboriginal phenotype as fully as dark as that of the Negro, while Josiah Nott, the American phrenologist, labeled the Aborigines Oceanic Negroes (8) Both African American and Australian Aboriginal protests thus represented a political attack on this arbitrary racial categorization. Second, the social ideologies behind reform efforts to abolish slavery in the United States and ameliorate the suffering of indigenous peoples in British colonies sprang from the evolutionary ethos of early 19th century British ethnology. One of the most important intellectual figures to trans-Atlantic abolitionists, evangelical missionaries in London and the British colonies, and to African American and Australian Aboriginal leaders, was James Cowles Pritchard. …

“Seoul—America” on America's “Soul”: South Koreans and Korean Immigrants Navigate Global White Racial Ideology1

Although students of race have produced impressive works on global Western racism, their mostly macro-level focus has not addressed how marginal groups respond to Western racial ideology and do so based on state and cultural influences. To capture Asians' localized responses to white- American superiority specifically, the author conducts a comparative case study of South Koreans and Korean American immigrants, fitting groups given US geopolitical dominance in South Korea since 1945 and large numbers of Korean immigrants in the USA. Drawing on 66 combined interviews (in-depth, open-ended, and focus group) in Seoul and in Los Angeles County, the author finds that while South Koreans and Korean Americans at times similarly adopt and resist white racial hegemony, their responses differ by way of state and cultural ideologies and practices. The US military presence in South Korea, supported by the Korean state, and imported American mass media culture centrally shape the residents' narratives. In the United States, the American “racial state” and attendant cultural ideologies (“democracy,” racial categories) figure centrally in Korean Americans' narrative responses to hegemony. The author concludes with the implications of localized analyses for global racism scholarship.

‘Hottentots’ and the evolution of European racism

Springing from the argument in recent scholarship that ‘race’ is a doctrine that emerged only in the post-Enlightenment, this essay develops a theory concerning the ideological history of ‘racism’, understood in its modern Western sense. While it is impossible to examine all forms of Western racism, the author focuses on evolving reactions in European travel accounts, belles-lettres and anthropology to the Khoikhoi, popularly known as ‘Hottentots’, a people that became proverbial as the most wretched and degraded of all ‘savages’. The question posed is why the Khoikhoi, a relatively peripheral and cooperative people, attracted this virulent hatred. Challenging the assumption of the small body of modern scholarship on the Khoikhoi, I maintain that this spite derived not simply from a sense of the Hottentots’ ‘Otherness’, but more accurately from the awareness that this people upset models of ethnicity that supported the Western vision of the non-European world. Europeans needed to neutralize the ideological threat represented by the Khoikhoi, a programme that culminated in the development of the modern science of ‘race’. ‘Race’, and its corresponding ideology of ‘racism’, I conclude, involves not merely the exclusion, but an approximation and appropriation of the ‘Other’ into Western systems of thought: the ultimate and fatal destiny of this highly distinct and independent culture.

Racism: A Short History

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewsFull AccessRacism: A Short HistoryJoshua Miller, Ph.D.Joshua MillerSearch for more papers by this author, Ph.D.Published Online:1 Apr 2004https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.55.4.459-aAboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail George M. Fredrickson is a major figure among historians of race and racism. In this book he has written a short history of Western racism that is concise, intelligent, informative, and well written. In three chapters he traces the early seeds of racism, its rise during the modern era, and its "hideous fruition" and eventual rejection in the 20th century. He also includes an epilogue that ponders the contours of racism in the 21st century and an appendix that traces racism as a concept in historical discourse.As a historian, Fredrickson paints his portrait of racism with bold strokes. He defines racism in his final sentence as occurring 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." Although viewing religious intolerance as a close cousin of racism, Fredrickson distinguishes it by virtue of its focus on beliefs rather than an essentialist notion of human difference.Fredrickson considers the irony of how the ascendancy of science and reasoning in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries and the collapse of theological and monarchical hierarchies both justified racism through a kind of "racial Darwinism," while also offering the vision and ethics to challenge racism through appeals to liberty and egalitarianism. The philosopher Charles Mills meditates on this idea in-depth in his excellent book, The Racial Contract (1).The three case studies of modern racism that Frederickson concentrates on are the Holocaust, apartheid in South Africa, and institutionalized racism in the southern United States. Fredrickson is more cautious about applying the term "racism" than are many social scientists and psychologists. He is concerned with the most extreme and systematic forms of racism and does not consider racism's more subtle manifestations, such as "aversive racism" (2) or "racial microagressions" (3). It would have been interesting to read more about his impressions of the United States today and how Fredrickson would characterize the burgeoning prison population that has such disproportionately high numbers of African-American and Latino inmates, or the enduring patterns of residential and school segregation.Racism: A Short History does not articulate the dynamics of racism in psychiatry today but does offer a useful, succinct description of racism's history in the Western world, which provides an important foundation for practitioners grappling to understand the impact of racism on our clients, on our work, and on ourselves.Dr. Miller is a professor at Smith College School of Social Work and chair of the school's social policy sequence.by George M. Fredrickson; Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2002, 216 pages, $22.95 softcover

America's Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood

American views of the Palestine-Israeli issue have been the subject of several important monograph studies over the past three decades. Lawrence Davidson, professor of history at West Chester University, however, offers an incisive and new perspective on many of the issues. He concentrates on the reaction of four leading American newspapers, the views of the State Department, the responses of Arab Americans, and the significance of important pressure groups from the time of the American missionary effort in the Near East in the nineteenth century and the rise of Zionism to the image Americans had as late as the 1960s of Israel “as a progressive Western outpost, and the Israelis as a modern people redeeming a land rightfully theirs,” as portrayed in the 1960 film Exodus. At the outset Davidson analyzes the significance of Americans with millenarian inclinations and the assumption of American Protestants in general during World War I that the Jews, led by the Zionist movement, had a right to return to their homeland and that such a return might set the stage for the fulfillment of prophecy. Of particular note are the accounts of President Woodrow Wilson's fundamentalist Christianity, his friendship with Louis Brandeis and Rabbi Stephen Wise, and the lack of self-determination for the Arab peoples at the peace conference because of “the Western racism inherent in the bipolar worldview.” During the 1920s Americans paid little attention to the socialist nature of Zionism, and, at a time when there was a growing conviction that Zionism reflected American values, there was increasing opposition to the position held by the State Department that Zionism was not to be included in the list of American national interests. By the early 1930s the State Department was resisting efforts to promote a rein-terpretation of the Palestine mandate that would limit the definition of the Jewish National Home at the same time as it promoted a democratic and constitutional form of government.

No Quarter: The Pacific Battlefield

Historically Speaking June 2002 Eric Bergenia No Quarter: The Pacific Battlefield World War ? was, by a great margin , the most violent conflict in modern times. YetJapanese and American soldiers fought the land war in die Pacific with a savage and relendess intensity thatwas rarelyequaled and neversurpassed in World War?. Although itis possible to identify incidents ofrestraint and humanity comingfrom both sides, the essence ofthe conflict was somediingvery close to a war ofannihilation . The grim nature ofthe PacificWaris best illustrated by the extremely low number of prisoners taken. The numbers tell a dismal tale. Approximately 37,000Japanese servicemen surrendered during land operations in the Pacific War. This was opposed to a total of killed in action that surpassed one million. In odierwords, foreveryJapanesesoldierorsailor fighting on land (Japan had no Marine Corps and the Naval personnel were involved in all major ground campaigns) who surrendered, there were twenty-five killed. In comparison , in northwest Europe both Britain and U.S. ground forces lost one prisoner for every two men killed. But the numbers are evenworse than dieyseem. Averyhighpercentage ofJapanese POWs surrendered in the waning months of the Pacific War in areassuch as the South Pacificorthe Philippines where imperial garrisons had long beenisolated. Menwere starving, in despair, and militarydiscipline was gone. Whatwas absent, however, was an organized surrender ofa large number ofprisoners during or at the end ofanyofthe majorland campaigns, the kind ofoccurrence that was typical in every other theater ofwar. After the surrenders ofseveral garrisons early in 1942, almost no American soldiers or Marines became prisoners and lived to tell the tale. In short, when the Japanese and Americans squared offinbatde dierewasno quarterasked or given. The most common explanation for what John Dower called "War without Mercy" is racial hatred between theJapanese and Americans . AlthoughJapan receives a share ofthe blame, deeply ingrained Western racism, as manifested in the United States, is found to be the prime culprit. Scholars attempt to prove their point with a cavalcade of propaganda posters, films, cartoons, and articles in the press. TheJapanese were systematically portrayed as animals; consequendy, so goes the argument, extermination was a natural response toJapan's attack. Many now argue that wartime propaganda campaigns in the West were only one manifestation among many ofan old pattern ofracist behavior that created the slave trade, underlay colonial empires, and led to the incarceration ofthousands ofJapanese citizens in the United States in 1942. 1 don'tdoubtdiatethnicloathingwas partofdie equation. However, foranumberof reasons, I find this argument incomplete. One problem is obvious. Ifthe murderous nature ofcombatin the Pacificwas generated byAmericanorWesternracial attitudes toward Asians, it is very difficult to explain why U.S. forces took huge numbers ofPOWs in the KoreanWar. Ifracial enlightenmenthad taken place or the Rules ofEngagement within the U.S. military had changed between 1945 and 1950, 1 find it difficult to detect. Likewise, in VietnamAmericans captured enemysoldiers in numbers that dwarfed those ofthe Pacific War. We should also remember that there was no history ofconflict betweenJapan and the United States. Nor were American soldiers fightingfordiephysicalsurvival ofdie United States.ManyinAmerica's intellectual classhad longfound much toadmireinJapan, aldiough Japanese aggression against China did much to tarnishTokyo'simage. More important, the segment in the American political arena that wished either to enter World War II or become more activelyinvolved had its eyes on die struggle againstHider. Although conspiracy theorists continue to try to prove otherwise , I am convinced that Washington very much wanted peace in Asia as long asJapan did not threaten Western interests in Southeast Asia. Idoubtsuchcalculationshad muchimpact on the young men swept up into war. Eighteen - ortwenty-year-olds of1941 were noless apolitical orself-possessed than dieircontemporaries oftoday. Ihavespentthe lastseven years researching the Pacific War and have interviewed about two hundred veterans of all services, mosdy American. I asked each about their attitudes toward theJapanese. When describing their wartime service, almost all expressed retrospective hatred: many admitted that the hatred had not totallycooled over a half-century. Interestingly , however, manyG.Ls pointed out that priortoservice in the Pacificdieyhad never met aJapanese person or an American citizen ofJapanese descent. These same men admitted that they knew almost nothing about Japan. Obviously, Pearl Harbor changed this situation overnight. It is also clear, in my view, that these men learned...

Racism: A Short History

Racism: A Short History. By George M. Fredrickson. (Princeton: Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Pp ix, 216. Acknowledgments, introduction, epilogue, appendix, notes, index. $22.95.) Historian George M. Fredrickson, an eminent authority on race and ethnicity, has produced a highly readable, sharply analytical, and consistently provocative overview of the course of Western racism from the Middle Ages to the present. He focuses on the evolution of the two most virulent forms of racism, anti-Semitism and color-coded white supremacy, that came to fullest fruition in the racist that emerged in the American South, Nazi Germany, and South Africa. Fredrickson compares and contrasts these regimes and probes the connections between with consummate skill. He also maintains that racism, always nationally specific, invariably became involved in searches for national identity and cohesion and varied with the historical experience of each country. Despite such variations, all three overtly racist regimes possessed common features, including the implementation of an official racist ideology that severely proscribed the rights, privileges, and opportunities of blacks and/ or Jews. This volume traces the origins of Western racism to medieval Europe, during an of intense religiosity in which the increasing hostility of Christians toward Jews transformed the anti-Judaism endemic to Christianity into an anti-Semitism that made getting rid of Jews preferable to converting them. Anti-Semitism, in turn, became racism when Jews came to be considered innately malevolent beings in league with the devil rather than merely guilty of harboring false beliefs. Of particular importance in this development was Spain, where attitudes and practices toward Muslims and Jews served as a kind of segue between the religious intolerance of the Middle Ages and the naturalistic racism of the modern era (p. 40). Although Fredrickson recognizes that Europeans had long associated the color black with evil, he nonetheless questions whether Europeans in general were strongly prejudiced against Africans prior to the beginning of the slave trade. Initially, he points out, religion rather than race justified the European enslavement of Africans: only way to save African souls was to enslave them (p. 38). The dark skins of West Africans soon became a part of the equation, and the so-called Curse of Ham or Canaan was invoked to demonstrate that African slavery was divinely inspired. However, anti-black racism took root slowly because it ran counter to the Christian belief that the entire human race was of one blood and worthy of salvation. Only when emancipated from Christian universalism did colorcoded racism become an ideology. The volume explores the route by which this emancipation took place, beginning in the eighteenth century with the invention of the concept of races as basic human types classified by skin color and other physical characteristics. The scientific racism that ultimately emerged was used to determine those groups, notably Jews and blacks, who were unfit to possess the rights of full citizenship. Scientific pronouncements regarding the innate inferiority of blacks lent legitimacy to popular views long held in the United States, especially in the South. …

International Pressure and the U.S. Government's Response to Little Rock

SEGREGATION RECEIVED MORE INTERNATIONAL CRITICISM than any other area of U.S. race relations in the post-World War II period. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations' racial reforms were a response not only to an increasingly effective civil rights movement in the U.S. South but also to international politics. Segregation hindered appeals to potential allies in competition with the Soviet bloc. So in its famous 1947 report President Truman's committee on civil rights concluded: Our position in the postwar world is so vital to the future that our smallest actions have far-reaching effects. . . . [T]he treatment which our Negroes receive is taken as a reflection of our attitudes toward all dark-skinned peoples. . . . We cannot escape the fact that our civil rights record has been an issue in world politics. . . . The United States is not so strong, the final triumph of the democratic ideal is not so inevitable that we can ignore what the world thinks of us or our record.1 Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson, cared little about black rights per se, but he was acutely conscious of the same connection. School segregation has been singled out for hostile foreign comment in the United Nations and elsewhere, he warned the attorney general in 1952.2 The State Department used particularly strong language in its amicus brief for the Brown case, argued in December 1952. During the past six years, the damage to our foreign relations attributable to [race discrimination] has become progressively greater. The United States is under constant attack in the foreign press, over the foreign radio, and in such international bodies as the United Nations. . . . [T]he undeniable existence of racial discrimination gives unfriendly governments the most effective kind of ammunition for their propaganda warfare. . . . [T]he view is expressed that the United States is hypocritical in claiming to be the champion of democracy while permitting practices of racial discrimination here in this country. . . . Other peoples cannot understand how [school segregation] can exist in a country which professes to be a staunch supporter of freedom, justice, and democracy. . . . [R]acial discrimination remains a source of embarrassment to this government in the day-to-day conduct of its foreign relations. . . . [I]t jeopardizes the effective maintenance of our moral leadership of the free and democratic nations of the world.3 The president's statements also bear the imprint of international pressure. As historian Richard Dalfiume notes, just about every speech . . . [Harry Truman] made on the civil rights issue . . . always brings up this point: The rest of the world is watching us. We must put our own house in order. The Truman administration's efforts to desegregate the armed forces and commit the Democratic party to black rights in 1948 must in part be understood as serving Cold War motives.4 The Eisenhower administration moved reluctantly in its first term. But in the second term, the 1955 murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, widely publicized discriminatory sentences by southern state courts, the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott, and, most dramatically, southern defiance of federal school desegregation orders all generated negative international publicity.5 At the Bandung Conference of 1955, representatives from Africa and Asia denounced western racism. During the Hungarian crisis of 1956, when the U.S. delegation to the United Nations pushed for sanctions against the Soviet Union, several foreign governments responded that the American government violated the civil and human rights of its own colored citizens.6 A similar response greeted U.S. efforts during the Berlin crisis of 1948-1949. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles even suggested at one point that the U.S. government's refusal to take a firm stand against South Africa's apartheid policy grew out of a fear of being charged with hypocrisy.7 While the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision helped improve America's image abroad, defiance of the decision attracted world-wide attention and resulted in a new round of criticism. …

Reviews

Uncivil society: ‘race’ and murder in Nazi Germany Tim Mason, Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the ‘National Community’, ed. Jane Caplan, introd. Ursula Vogel, trans. John Broadwin. Oxford and Providence, Rl: Berg, 1993. xxviii+434pp. Notes. Append. Bibl. Ind. £50.00. David F. Crew (ed.), Nazism and German Society, 1933–1945. London and New York: Routledge, 1994 (Rewriting Histories series). xi+316pp. Notes. £11.99. It's the real thing Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context. Volume 1: The Holocaust and Mass Death in the Modern Age. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. xviii+702pp. Bibl. Ind. Notes. £40.00. True adventures of court Jews Eli M. Rosenbaum with William Hoffer, Betrayal. The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover‐Up. New York: St Martin's Press, 1993. xx+522pp. Ind. $25.95. Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace. Jews and the State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. x+266pp. Ind. $22.00. Columbus and the legacy of 1492 Zia Sardar, Ashis Nandy and Merryl Wyn Davies, Barbaric Others. A Manifesto on Western Racism, London: Pluto Press, 1993. 95pp. Bibl. £7.95. Dutch ambivalence Allison Blakely, Blacks in the Dutch World. The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993. xx+327pp. Notes. Ind. Maps. Illus. £32.50. Agile Italian evasions Daniel Carpi, Between Mussolini and Hitler: The Jews and the Italian Authorities in France and Tunisia. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1994 (Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry Series, 17). x+341 pp. Notes. Bibl. Ind. £35.00/$59.95. What colour are Jews? Milton Shain, The Roots of Antisemitism in South Africa. Charlottes‐ville, VA and London: University Press of Virginia, 1994. xii+203pp. Notes. Bibl. Ind. $45.00. Surveying European racism John Wrench and John Solomos (eds.), Racism and Migration in Western Europe, Oxford and Providence, RI: Berg, 1993. x+293pp. Bibl. Ind. £34.95.