| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Racism: A Short History for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Fredrickson deftly combines intellectual with social and political history to explain the emergence of racism and its recent decline. Learned and elegant. -- William H. McNeill, The New York Review of Books
Fredrickson [stands] out from a number of distinguished collegues [because of] his continuing urge to widen the comparative framework he uses to try to understand why these relations have developed as they did. Racism: A Short History is his most drastic venture to date--a brisk positioning of Southern racial domination within world history as a whole. -- John Dunn, Times Literary Supplement
An erudite comparison of racism and anti-Semitism throughout Western history. . . . Fredrickson offers a scholarly but compelling and accessible narrative. -- "Publishers Weekly
Fredrickson's book should be celebrated. The chief reason is the text itself. One of only a handful of attempts to cover Western attitudes towards race comprehensively, Fredrickson's Racism is by far the most concise and lucid. It is also the most balanced. . . . [W]hat ultimately makes Fredrickson's book so valuable is its original vision of the major racisms--its view of them as belonging to a coherent historical narrative. . . . Reviewers often apply the term 'path-breaking' to works that simply trim back a few errant branches. But Fredrickson's book really is path-breaking. -- Paul Reitter, The Nation
In this incisive and thoughtful essay on the nature and historical trajectory of racism in the modern world, Fredrickson's magisterial command of his subject is on display as he provides a concise overview of racism's rise, climax, and retreat. -- "Choice
Racism, in short, comes with a history, and it is to scrutinize racism's history and reasoning that Fredrickson decided to write this brisk, intense, incisive probe of the concept and its implications. The result is the best, most erudite introduction to racism available. -- Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer
Racism: A Short History is a tour de force within this genre. Richly footnoted and elegantly written, the book is a model of clarity and sophisticated analysis. -- Milton Shain, Kleio
Product Description
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.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Definition in hand, Fredrickson provides a fascinating overview of how religious prejudice (against Jews and heathens) gradually transformed (through different paths) into racial prejudice, and how racial prejudice became official policy in the American South of the Jim Crow era, Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa. (European attitudes toward Native Americans are briefly explored, but then dropped without much development, and the eventual subjugation of Native Americans by the federal government is ignored completely, for reasons which are not apparent to me.) While pointing out significant differences between these three instances of racism, Fredrickson also draws some interesting parallels and contrasts. The role of international events and economic developments in first creating and then destroying these overtly racist regimes is explored in enough detail to make me want to read more.
Fredrickson provides the reader with a lot to think about, including the role of racism today, and whether "biological" racism is now being transformed into a kind of "culturism" that makes certain aspects of culture stand in for race. This is a book of "big thoughts" (as one might expect from a short history), and fulfills an important role in setting out a grand theory that others can respond to. The writing is clear, concise and readily intelligible to non-scholars. Fredrickson does not purport to provide any cures or even suggestions for eliminating current strains of this old disease, but like all good historians he identifies the symptoms and the conditions in which the disease flourishes. Highly recommended.
However racism took off in a big way in the 19th Century. The Enlightenment had made it possible to see mankind as a type of animal. In that animals had certain characteristics it became fashionable to attribute cultural differences in people to a biological cause. It became fashionable to characterise people who lives in Britain or Germany as members of the British or German race rather than as Britons or Germans. The poverty of other groups such as Africans was seen as a product of their racial breeding rather than being the result of their history and sociology. European universities developed departments that investigated the pseudo science of Eugenics or the study of the biological character of races.
Racism became something that was supported by the actions of states. Places such as Australia developed immigration policies to preserve the racial character of their state. In South Africa and America political systems, were developed aimed at subjugating blacks.
Germany brought about the end of racism as an accepted part of main stream policy by its crimes. One of the interesting facts raised in the book is that the Holocaust was Germany?s second tray at Genocide. In South West Africa it had been German policy to exterminate two of the main tribes. One tribe consisting of 60,000 people had 44,000 killed and the remaining 16,000 only survived by fleeing.
The end of the book suggests that while the Holocaust has sent racism into a decline as a state supported policy racism is not dead. In addition the world faces a new challenge with obnoxious doctrines similar to racism being framed in the language of religious fundamentalism.
The first is attempt to get to grips with the word 'racism' itself which, as Fredrickson points out, is an increasingly debased epithet, used by each side against another in debates on ethnicity, nationality and religion. His definition requires not just perceived differences from another group, but also the power to exploit them.
The second is an understanding of what the author calls the double-edged sword of enlightenment thought on race. As I scientist, I've sometimes been exasperated by post-modern disdain for the enlightenment as the supposed progenitor of Nazism. But the book convinced me that there is a case for this, at least as one side of a contrapuntal understanding: "Egalitarian norms required special reasons for exclusion." On this reading, a kind of polarizing dialectic takes hold: higher ideals require stronger justifications for retaining privilege. Enlightenment ideals imply democracy, but racist pseudoscience appeals to the same source in order to restrict it.
The catharsis of World War II supposedly halted this process. There's a whiff of Whig history here, but it's dispelled by the trenchant close: "Grasping for one's identity in a world that threatens to reduce everyone who is not part of the elite to a low-paid worker or a consumer of cheap, mass-produced commodities creates a hunger for meaning and a sense of self-worth that can most easily be satisfied by consciousness of race or religion."
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > History > Cultural History
- Books > History > Other Historical Subjects
- Books > History > World History
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Academic Sociology
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Anthropology > Social & Cultural
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Discrimination & Racism > Racism
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
