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Essay on The Role Of Race In Hate Crimes
Racist" is a term of opprobrium these days. For years, Israel was branded a most "racist nation" and Zionism was equated with racism by the United Nations until that organization finally repealed the infamous resolution. Black demagogues like to brand opponents "racists." The word is loaded with nasty connotations almost equivalent to "Nazi." But the phrase has been more often than not misapplied, as George Fredrickson insists in his latest work, Racism: A Short History. A professor of sociology at Stanford University and author of significant works on anti-black racism, Fredrickson offers a concisely lucid analysis of the origins of racism, which he defines as hostile or negative feelings of one group towards another and actions that result. The defining traits of race are innate or unchangeable, e.g., skin pigmentation.
"Racism exists when one ethnic group or historical collectivity dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate another on the basis of differences that it believes are hereditary or unalterable." A racist doesn't hate a person for "what he believes but for what he is." (Fredrickson, 2002) A racist state such as South Africa under the apartheid regime or Nazi Germany legalizes racism and develops a hierarchy to promote and enforce its racist ideology.
Fredrickson maintains that racism was born in Spain in the 15th and 16th centuries with the Marrano problem and the notion of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood). Hitherto, a Jew could pass into the mainstream of Christian civilization by conversion. But as tens of thousands were forcibly baptized, especially after the pogroms of 1391, Spanish grandees and churchmen found themselves swamped by conversos, Jews of questionable Christian loyalties, many of whom were indeed secret Jews. Consequently, they developed the new theory that race is ineradicable. In a sense, the author suggests that the seeds of Nazism were sown in late medieval Spain......
