Racism by Fredrickson George M

Author:Fredrickson, George M.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2002-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

This text reveals more about the deep sources of extreme racism than almost any that could be found. The lynch mobs of the American South often justified their atrocities by alleging the rape or attempted rape of white women by black men. The fear of sexual pollution or violation by the allegedly subhuman race is close to the heart of murderous or genocidal racism whenever and wherever it appears. In the racist imagination, blacks have been somewhat more likely than Jews to be viewed as violent sexual predators. The myth of the oversized black penis may be contrasted with the turn-of-the-century antisemitic belief that the large Jewish nose signified a small penis, further truncated by circumcision. Such images raised questions about Jewish masculinity or virility.33 But the villainous eighteenth-century “Court Jew” in Viet Harlan’s 1940 film Jew Süss manages to rape a woman from a prominent Christian family and is lynched as a result.34 The notion of the Jew as a cunning seducer, and occasionally a violent rapist, was a staple of Nazi propaganda. In the passage warning against “the black-haired Jewish youth” Hitler also manages to arouse fears of black sexuality when he blames the Jews for the introduction into the Rhineland of soldiers from the French African colonies, some of whom had affairs with German women that resulted in children of mixed ancestry. A Negrophobic white supremacist as well as a racist antisemite, the future Führer identified the principle of racial equality being promulgated by Jews and Marxists with “a bastardized and niggerized world” in which “all concepts of the humanly beautiful and sublime, as well as all ideas of an idealized future of our humanity, would be lost forever.”35 Hitler even claimed that the French toleration of black-white intermarriage and its seemingly colorblind conception of assimilation was turning France into an extension of Africa into the heartland of Europe.36

Like everyone else who was threatening German nationality and racial purity, the French were of course doing the bidding of the Jews—the ultimate enemy. At no point in Mein Kampf does Hitler explicitly call for the extermination of the Jews, but the implication that they would have no place in a resurgent and regenerated Germany is unmistakable. Furthermore, given the fact that they were able to use nations like France and Russia as tools of their diabolical conspiracy, full security and fulfillment for Germany would be guaranteed only if all the Jews in the world were eliminated or at least rendered powerless. Something like the Holocaust was not an illogical or far-fetched consequence of such thinking. Something more than, or different from, simple biological racism may be required for an understanding of Hitler’s phobic antisemitism and that of some of his followers. In the statement he dictated to Martin Bormann shortly before his death in 1945, he called the Jews “more than anything else, a community of the spirit . . . with a sort of relationship with destiny.” Their “trait of not being able to assimilate . . .

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