#george fredrickson

[lamestream-media]

Although medieval Arabs and Moors had white slaves as well as black and thus did not practice the purely racial slavery that Europeans carried to the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they generally assigned blacks the most menial and degrading tasks. In southern Iberia the most conspicuous slaves of light-skinned or tawny Moorish masters were black Africans, and it was natural for Christians, as well as Muslims, to begin to associate sub-Saharan African ancestry with lifetime servitude.

George Fredrickson 2002: Racism, A Short History.

[lamestream-media]

The secular Enlightenment was a double-edged sword. Its naturalism made a color-coded racism seemingly based on science thinkable and thus set the stage for nineteenth century biological determinism. But at the same time, it established in the minds of some a premise of equality in this world rather than merely in heaven or under God, an assumption that could call into question the justice and rationality of black slavery and Jewish ghettoization. The Enlightenment thus managed to give new salience and potency to the concept of race while at the same time making it possible to question whether its use as a basis for social ranking and privilege was just and reasonable.

George Fredrickson 2002: Racism, A Short History

[lamestream-media]

Admittedly, however, there is a substantial gray area between racism and ‚culturalism.‘ One has to distinguish among differing conceptions of culture. If we think of culture as historically constructed, fluid, variable in time and space, and adaptable to changing circumstances, it is a concept antithetical to that of race. But culture can be reified and essentialized to the point where it becomes the functional equivalent of race.

George Fredrickson 2002: Racism, A Short History

[lamestream-media]

It might be useful to have another term, such as ‚culturalism,‘ to describe an inability or unwillingness to tolerate cultural differences, but if assimilation were genuinely on offer, I would withhold the ‚R‘ word. Even if a group - for example, Muslims in the Ottoman Empire or Christians in early medieval Europe - is privileged in the eyes of the secular and religious authorities, 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.

George Fredrickson 2002: Racism, A Short History

[lamestream-media]

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. I would not therefore consider the sincere missionary, who may despise the beliefs and habits of the object of his or her ministrations, to be a racist. 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.

George Fredrickson 2002: Racism, A Short History

[lamestream-media]

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.

George Fredrickson 2002: Racism, A Short History