In this summary I have summarized the literature of the course Racism in the Western World and the lectures. The content of this document can you find in the table of contents. It is an extensive summary.
Summary Racism in the Western World – M. Lamain – 2022/2023 – Lectures + literature
Table of contents
Week 1................................................................................................................................... 3
1.1. Literature..................................................................................................................... 3
1.1.1. George M. Fredrickson - Racism: a short history (Intro + part 1).........................3
1.1.2. Gianamar Singh - Racial Capitalism in Voltaire’s Enlightenment.......................11
Week 2................................................................................................................................. 17
2.1 Lecture 1.................................................................................................................... 17
Week 3................................................................................................................................. 20
3.1 Lecture 2.................................................................................................................... 20
3.2 Literature.................................................................................................................... 21
3.2.1 Jane Burbank & Frederick Cooper - Empires in World History: Powers and the
Politics of Difference....................................................................................................21
3.2.2 Frederickson, Racism - Part II............................................................................29
3.2.3 Maryse Conde - Tales from my Heart.................................................................37
3.2.4 The French Caribbean in the Eighteenth Century - Code Noir 1685...................39
3.2.5 Jean Baptiste Belley - The True Colors of the Planters, or the System of the
Hotel Massiac, Exposed by Gouli 1795.......................................................................40
Week 4................................................................................................................................. 42
4.1 Lecture....................................................................................................................... 42
4.2 Literature.................................................................................................................... 48
4.2.1 Frederickson, Racism - Part III...........................................................................48
4.2.2 Ta-Nehisi Coates; The Case for Reparations Revisited......................................55
Week 5................................................................................................................................. 57
5.1 Lecture - Antisemitism and the Holocaust..................................................................57
5.2 Literature.................................................................................................................... 60
5.2.1 Ensel, Remco & Evelien Gans - The Holocaust, Israel and ‘the Jew’ -
Introductory essay.......................................................................................................60
5.2.2 Ensel, Remco & Evelien Gans - The Holocaust, Israel and ‘the Jew’ - Israël:
Source of divergence..................................................................................................66
Week 6................................................................................................................................. 71
6.1 Lecture - Traces of slavery in the city of Utrecht........................................................71
Week 7................................................................................................................................. 73
7.1 Lecture - Racism in the United Kingdom....................................................................73
7.2 Literature.................................................................................................................... 75
7.2.1 David Olusoga - ‘Nationalist Convulsions’ in Black and British: A Forgotten
History......................................................................................................................... 75
Part 1 - 1-28............................................................................................................ 75
489-520.................................................................................................................. 78
7.2.2 Gargi Bhattacharya - Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State.............81
Week 8................................................................................................................................. 83
8.1 Lecture....................................................................................................................... 83
8.2 Literature.................................................................................................................... 86
8.2.1 Gloria Wekker - White innocence: paradoxes of colonialism and race...............86
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,Summary Racism in the Western World – M. Lamain – 2022/2023 – Lectures + literature
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,Summary Racism in the Western World – M. Lamain – 2022/2023 – Lectures + literature
Week 1
1.1. Literature
1.1.1. George M. Fredrickson - Racism: a short history (Intro + part 1)
George M. Fredrickson, Racism: a short history (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 2002), Introduction
and part 1 (p. 1-47.)
Introduction
The term ‘’racism’’ is often used to describe the hostile or negative feelings of one ethnic
group or ‘’people’’ toward another an dhte actions resulting from such attitudes. But
sometimes, this antipathy is expressed and acted upon with a single-mindedness that goes
far beyond the group-centered prejudice. For example: Hitler invoked racist theories to justify
his genocidal treatment of European Jewry or Jim Crow / white supremacists with laws to
keep whites and blacks separated + unequal.
The climax of the history of racism came in the twentieth century with overtly racist regimes.
In the American South the passage of segregation laws and restrictions on black voting
rights reduced African Americans to lower-case status. Extreme racist propaganda - black
males as beasts lusting after white women - served to rationalize lynching (very torturous
extralegal executions of often black people).
The South had a fear of sexual contamination through rape or intermarriage and this effort to
guarantee ‘race purity’ anticipated aspects of the official Nazi persecution of Jews in the
1930s. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 prohibited intermarriage or sexual relations between
Jews and gentiles. Racist ideology was eventually carried to a more extreme point in Nazi
Germany than in the American South of Jim Crow.
Hitler gave racism a bad name - moral revulsion + scientific studies served to discredit the
scientific racism that had been influential before WW2. But explicit racism also came under
attack by the new nations resulting from the decolonization of Africa and Asia. The civil rights
movements in the US succeeded in outlawing legalized racial segregation and discrimination
in the 1960s.
The one racist regime that survived WW2 and the Cold War was the South African, which
did not come to fruition until the advent of apartheid in 1948. They had laws banning all
mariage and sexual relatons between different poujlation groups and required separate
residential areas for people of mixed race (Coloreds), as well as for Africans.
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, or its cultural essentialist equivalent are a thing of the past. But Racism does not
require support of the state and the law, and an ideology centered on the concept of
biological inequality. Discrimination can persist and flourish under the illusion of non racism.
There are allegations of a new ‘cultural racism’.
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. The word
racism came into common usage in the 1930s when a new word was required to describe
the theories on which Nazis based their persecution of the Jews. However, our
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, Summary Racism in the Western World – M. Lamain – 2022/2023 – Lectures + literature
understanding of what is considered to be racist has been unstable.
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. Racism as Frederickson oneives 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. 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 has a historical trajectory and it originated in at least a prototypical form in the
14th and 15th centuries rather than in the 18th or 19th. Racism therefore is not merely
xenophobia - a reflexive feeling of hostility to the stranger or other - it may be the starting
point. A clear distinction between racism and religious intolerance is crucial. Religious
intolerance persecutes others for what they believe, not for who they intrinsically are.
Another term, such as “culturalism,” could be used to describe an inability or unwillingness to
tolerate cultural differences. 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. There is a gray area between racism and ‘’culturalism’’ - there
has to be a distinction between conceptions of culture. Culture can be essentialized to the
point where it becomes the functional equivalent to race. Deterministic cultural particularism
can do the work of biological racism as we shall see in discussions of volkisch nationalism in
Germany and South Africa.
British Sociologists have identified and analyzed what they called the ‘’new cultural racism’’ -
race is now coded as culture; the qualities of social groups are fixed, confined with pseudo
biologically defined culturalism. Racism therefore is an ideology which gains its power from
its ability to pick out and utilize ideas and values from other sets of ideas in specific socio-
historical contexts.
His conception of racism has two components: difference and power. It originates from a
mindset that regards ‘’them’’ as different from ‘’us’’ in ways that are permanent and
unbridgeable. This provides a motive for using our power advantage to treat the ethnoracial
Other in ways that we would regard as cruel/unjust if applied to members of our own group.
The French sociologist Pierre-André Taguieff has distinguished between two distinctive
logics of racism:
1. Le racism d’exploitation - racism of inclusion: permit incorporation only based on a
rigid hierarchy justified by a belief in permanen unbridgeable differences between the
associated groups. (e.g. white supremacy)
2. Le racism d’extermination - racism of exclusion: there is no way that the groups
(racializers and racialized) can coexist in the same society. (e.g. antisemitism)
However, history is too messy to enable us to use these dichotomies consistently in a group-
specific way. His conception may at first seem too broad to have the historical specificity that
he promised to give it, but he will concentrate on racism in Europe and its colonial
extensions since the fifteenth century for several reasons.
1. The virus of racism did not infect Europe itself prior to the period between the late
medieval and early modern periods.
2. The varieties of racism that have developed in the West had a greater impact on
world history than any functional equivalent that we might detect in another era or
part of the world.
3. The logic of racism was fully worked out, elaborately implemented, and carried to its
ultimate extremes in the West, while at the same time being identified and resisted
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