Roots of racism

...One hopes that it will find such an audience and that its readers, in both the United States and South Africa, will find through it the courage to face pasts which, though horrid, are shown to be fluid as well...

...when natives resisted expansion and, with the "expectant capitalism" of the Age of Jackson, inaugurated a fullblown program of Indian removal...

...He suggests how classical liberal ideas applied differently in the United States and South Africa...

...Fredrickson identifies industrialism and white labor as keys to the modern evolution of racial attitudes in South Africa and the United States...

...The Dutch in South Africa first sought commerce rather than territory and only gradually developed a rather unreflective set of justifications for displacing the Khoikhoi herders with whom they had once first traded for cattle and whom they later exploited in a variety of quasi-feudal labor arrangements...

...Nonetheless, I am not convinced that such a division of labor— between those who study black from those who study white attitudes—is necessary or fruitful in writing the history of race relations...

...which generally ruled the Cape colony through class, not racial, discrimination...

...He argues that Seventeenth Century British colonials in America and the Dutch at the Cape of Good Hope acted partly in response to previous experiences which their nations had had with "native problems" in Ireland and in the Dutch East Indies respectively...

...Liberalism in South Africa went hand in hand with British imperialism...

...In South Africa, whites perfected a legal color bar to prevent the elevation of blacks into semi-skilled positions...

...The comparatively tardy development of articulate white supremacist thought in South Africa is also central to Fredrickson's chapters on slavery and miscegenation...

...Despite such objections...

...The idea of a comparison of race relations in South Africa and the United States is bold, but the analysis is coolly precise and the moral outrage understated...

...One measure of the success of White Supremacy will be the extent to which it excites praise even from those who register objections to specific points...

...It is aimed, according to Fredrickson, at a broad audience beyond academia...

...White Supremacy remains a giant success...

...A more specific criticism also deserves mention...

...Segregation, and mob terror, in the American South established a racial hierarchy in an ambiguous social setting...

...We are all suspicious of testimonials on book jackets...

...My own strongest reservation is that white supremacist thought is largely isolated from the ideas and behavior of the black community...

...So when a noted scholar comments, on White Supremacy's jacket, that "Fredrickson's book is the most important study—by far—of race relations written in our time," we shake skeptical heads...

...A rigid pass system limiting the mobility and job choices of African laborers developed early under the auspices of the Chamber of Mines and functioned to discipline labor and provide security for white settlements...

...In America, colonists drew upon the Irish model in setting up agricultural settler colonies on land seized from native Indians...

...The sections on labor and industry are less firmly based in a mastery of the historical literature than the rest of the book and tend both to overstate the role of immigration in eroding class consciousness in America and to caricature Marxist thought on racism and labor...

...South African black workers also did mainly manual labor, but often in industrial settings, especially mines...

...Fredrickson anticipates this objection and observes that his study will be useful to future scholars comparing "nonwhite responses" to white supremacy in that it will show "what nonwhites were up against...

...Ironically, in view of present practice, South African whites forged a notion of slavery based on race, rather than on religion, a full century later than Americans...

...In the American North, the revolutionary heritage, evangelical Protestantism, and an expansive free labor capitalism combined by the mid-Nineteenth Century to call the slave system into question...

...Combining a special vocabulary ("engrossing contribution") and wild overstatement ("the most important book of the decade"), such blurbs typically range from vacuity to absurdity...

...White Supremacy consists of six long essays, organized around themes but also advancing chronologically...

...In both the American South and in South Africa after the Great Trek, a racist herrenvolk democracy obtained, linking "equality" among whites with the subordination of a black underclass...

...At the Cape, liberalism continually gave ground to the military and political successes of white supremacists...

...Apartheid sought, and seeks, to eliminate ambiguity through such legal devices as the color bar and the confining of blacks to separate territories...

...Incredibly, South Africans persisted in significant numbers of acknowledged interracial marriages for two centuries and often, especially in the early years, ascribed status as members of the dominant group to the offspring of such unions...

...In one of his essays Fredrickson discusses the impact of the democratic revolutions a,nd liberal humanita-rianism of the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries...

...Only with the Great Trek in the 1840s did Dutch frontiersmen fashion a militant rationale for dispossession, and then they did so mainly out of a parochial brand of Old Testament Protestantism which linked territorial demands with a divine plan for white rule...

...Although sometimes attracted to the view of Indians as noble savages in the unsullied wilderness, Americans reverted to use of force David R. Roediger, books editor of In These Times, has specialized in black history...

...Fredrickson explores the differing contexts of "settlement and subjugation" in North America and South Africa...

...In the United States, with its weightier revolutionary tradition, earlier free market development, and larger white population, herrenvolk democracy was very much on the defensive, both before and after the Civil 'War...

...The fact that the cultural and physical distance between the races was far less in the United States differentiated Southern segregation from the evolving apartheid system...

...A comparative approach enhances this desire to understand by emphasizing that the development of racial prejudice and racist practice has occurred in complex, contradictory, and often surprising ways...

...While the North featured a passive "aversive racism" of its own, the aggressive "dominative racism" of the South was alien to its world view...

...He contends that in the United States a cultural perception that blacks would not work well with machines existed before 1900 and blunted drives for legal restrictions on the occupations of Afro-Americans...

...In his concluding essay Fredrickson brings together the book's themes in a sustained comparison of the growth of segregation in the two societies...

...Fredrickson, whose Black Image in the White Mind remains the most thorough history of American racism, obviously sees much of the past he recounts as pathological, but such a perception excites in him an urge to understand rather than simply to castigate...

...But in this case such high praise is not unwarranted...

...Fredrickson dates the beginning of systematic practices in the United States at about 1890 and holds that South African segregation took hold two decades later with the establishment of white native self-rule...

...Even after black participation in American industry rose in the post-1900 period, a strong laissez-faire tradition caused discrimination in employment to be enforced mainly through the private actions of craft unions, employers, and white mobs...