Racism (80-120)

Summary: When one comes to consider racism as an inevitable encounter with strangers and aliens, it completely takes the subject outside of history. If racism is thought of as a historical construction associated with the rise of modernity and with specific national contexts, then it can have an end to it. Plenty of historians, have made comparisons with whites and the Nazis, Jews. All of those racist regimes have been overthrown. Racism has existed long before the nineteenth century.

Many societies have been plural in racial prejudice and its tributes. They authorize the differences between dominant groups and the group being subjugated. The sense of racial difference and alienation is expressed in the laws a state is able to pass. Social segregation is mandated by law, and not merely the custom of product or private acts of discrimination. The state's goal is simply to bar all types of contact and equality with the segregators and the segregated. Also, such groups are excluded from being able to hold public office. The access they have to the resources around them are diminished, thus making them impoverished. This all well applied to the Jim Crow Laws of the South. Even though the blacks were free, laws were being placed on them which pretty much put them back under white control.

Societies have been made racist, they can be described as racialized societies. Even then they still fall in the same range of hatred with those who have already been introduced to racism. Whites among these, occupied an advantage position at the hands of indigenous populations. Common citizenship could long turn strong prejudices into exclusions of a kind that would be justified.

Quote: "The Negro is not bound by any treaty but only by brute force" (Fredrickson 112).

Reaction: Groups in South west Africa like the Nama were also targeted, they are the only surviving pure blooded descendants of the Khoikhoi which occupied most of southern Africa. The Germans intended to wipe out their entire race. They believed the Name were completely useless, and that they should not preserve the race. The Negroes were trying to be forced out of everything.