Racism: Coded as Culture?

This book makes a good case for racism--the word, not the ideology. What necessitated a defense? The term has been both abused and abandoned; many scholars, and most of us, use it so widely that it has lost specificity and, with that, analytic value. As a result, other scholars have found alternatives.

George M. Fredrickson tells us that he did, too. In an earlier book he employed instead the phrase "white supremacy." The problem was that his topic there, "color-coded" discrimination in the United States and South Africa, developed as part of a larger phenomenon, and the best word for that turned out to be "racism." For despite having been stretched, the word has the weight of tradition. It became common coinage after one of the early systematic critiques of Nazism. Just after the Nazis had ascended to power, Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay German-Jewish sexologist, attached the label of racism to their worldview, pithily evoking the centrality of race in it. Racism stuck for a reason.

Of course, Fredrickson's main argument is historical rather than terminological. But the issue of naming deserves attention, because writing the history of "racism" entails defining or, really, redefining this very important word. And, indeed, at the beginning of his book Fredrickson hazards a formal definition.

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