RACISM

also called Racialism, the theory or idea that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and certain traits of personality, intellect, or culture and, combined with it, the notion that some races are inherently superior to others. It is difficult to establish the origins of racist thinking, but certainly one of the most influential of such thinkers was the French writer and diplomat Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau (q.v.), who published his four-volume Essay on the Inequality of Human Races in the middle of the 19th century. He taught the superiority of the white race over all others, and, among the whites, of the Aryans as having reached the heights of civilization. Gobineau's most important follower was Houston Stewart Chamberlain (q.v.), who published The Foundations of the 19th Century in German in 1899. An Englishman by birth, Chamberlain spent most of his life in Germany, where he was so popular with the ruling class that he became known as the kaiser's anthropologist. He, too, insisted on the superiority of the Teutons, whom he characterized physically as being for the most part tall, fair, and dolichocephalic (longheaded), that is to say, corresponding to the Nordic type. Chamberlain regarded the Jews as alien in spirit to the favoured Teutons, although he admitted the difficulty of distinguishing Jews from Germans on the basis of physical characteristics alone. Although there were many other writers who developed the modern racist position, such as Ludwig Woltmann and H.F.K. Gnther in Germany, and Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant in the United States, Gobineau and Chamberlain may be regarded as the intellectual forerunners of the racial theories of the German Nazis. Adolf Hitler himself acknowledged his indebtedness to these theorists, particularly to Chamberlain, for giving him the scientific basis for this aspect of his political philosophy. There were, of course, inner contradictions in the Nazi approachthe fact that so many Germans did not look like Nordics and so many Jews did; the alliance with the Japanese, who had consequently to be exempted from the racial restrictions of the Third Reich; and the difficulty of giving any clear meaning to the concepts of German blood or soul, among othersso that facts had to be replaced by mysticism. In spite of these and other deficiencies, racialism was used as a technique which helped to unify the Germans by identifying the enemy, gave the people a strong sense of ego enhancement and self-confidence, justified economic exploitation and slave labour, obtained support for the war, and convinced the Germans that they never could be defeated. Racism thus functioned as one of the most effective techniques of Nazi propaganda for achieving and maintaining power over the German people. Although colonialism cannot be compared with Nazism in terms of the violence and virulence of the human destruction it involved, it also found in racialism a helpful rationalization for conquest and expansion. When the Spaniards first came to America, several of their apologists (particularly Francisco de Quevedo and Juan Gins de Seplveda) supplied them with the proper excuses for taking the land away from the Indians and for treating them with complete lack of consideration. They developed the theory that the Indians had an entirely different origin from that of the Spaniards, that they were not human in the same sense, and that there was therefore no need to accord to them the same treatment as to one's fellow human beings. The familiar refrain of the white man's burden, which was mainly of British manufacture and which found its literary expression in the writings of Thomas Carlyle, James A. Froude, and Charles Kingsley, and most strongly and clearly in those of Rudyard Kipling, made of imperialism a noble activity destined to bring civilization to the benighted members of other races. Similarly, the French justified the maintenance of their colonial empire on the basis of their mission civilisatrice, their duty to bring civilization to the backward peoples of the world. In all of these colonizing empires, there were undoubtedly many individuals honestly convinced of the nobility of their motives and their enterprise; at the same time, the feelings of racial superiority that accompanied colonialism played an important part in developing resentments among the colonized which even emancipation and independence have not always made it possible to overcome. There has developed in some parts of the world racialism in reverse, a degree of hostility of coloured peoples against whites as whites. It remains true that in general, although with certain striking exceptions, the trend has been away from racism. The emergence of new nations, many of them former colonies, has meant that many more nations composed of coloured peoples have an independent voice in international affairs that commands a respectful hearing even from previous colonizers. The recognition that the treatment of ethnic minorities within a country may have important implications for international relations has focussed attention upon the need to improve intergroup relations in general. The work of scientists like Franz Boas in anthropology and Gunnar Myrdal and others in the social sciences helped to destroy much of the mythological thinking associated with race. The trend has been reversed in the Republic of South Africa, where separation of ethnic groups increased from 1948 on (see apartheid). In the United States, on the other hand, the movement was gradually and progressively in the direction of providing greater equality of opportunity for all ethnic groups. The first dramatic expression of this tendency was furnished by the unanimous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court on May 17, 1954, based in part on social-science research, that the enforced segregation of black schoolchildren in certain states and localities was contrary to the principles of the U.S. Constitution.