NP Of interest (M&D-related)

[jbor]

http://smh.com.au/articles/2002/09/20/1032054954233.html

Review of _Racism: A Short History_
by George M. Fredrickson

Excerpt:

[...] So defined, racism is a product of the West, because it is only there
that the social conditions for its emergence existed. Paradoxically,
Fredrickson claims, it is the growth of egalitarian ideas which provided the
soil in which racism grew. There are two powerful sources of egalitarianism
in Western culture. One is religious: the dominant religion, Christianity,
is committed, in theory at least, to the spiritual equality of all people
before God. The other source of egalitarianism is determinedly secular, even
anti-religious: the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Whereas Christians
proclaim spiritual equality, the Enlightenment proclaims an equality of
rights, which requires that human beings actually be treated in ways which
reflect this equality.

How can the proclamation of the equality of all human beings lead to the
systematic defence of inequality that is racism?

Most societies, Fredrickson points out, take inequality for granted. For
that very reason, it needs no special explanation. But in a culture in which
equality of rights is the official norm, gross inequality of treatment
therefore must be justified. If a society proclaims, as the slave-owning
United States did, that "all men are created equal", then it can justify
systematic inequality only upon the grounds that the victims of
discrimination are not fully human.

Enlightenment egalitarianism is a product of the age of science, and science
provided racists with the justifications they needed. Though racism had
first begun to sprout in the soil of Christianity, so long as the Christian
story of the creation of the ancestor of all humanity by God held sway, the
extent to which there could be natural and inheritable differences between
different groups of human beings was limited.

But the scientific revolution made it possible to question the biblical
tale, and provided tools for classifying species which could be applied to
human beings. The notion of race, which was earlier used to refer to nations
and their inhabitants, acquired something like its modern meaning only in
the 18th century. Now, for the first time, intellectual and spiritual
inferiority was heritable, and hierarchy was a consequence of the indelible
differences between human beings. Xenophobia had become racism. [...]

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