Page 240 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

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decades, ultra-patriotic ideologues who stressed the South and South Africa, further discredited theories of
importance of racial purity as the key to the superiority racial difference and their use to legitimize discrimination.
of the Japanese people played critical roles in launching Despite these countervailing trends and campaigns
an increasingly militarized society on the path to external explicitly aimed at eliminating racial prejudice mounted
aggression, empire building, and ultimately a disastrous by international organizations such as the United
war against the United States and its European and Nations, racism has persisted both in popular attitudes in
Pacific allies. many societies and, in some instances, state policy, such
as the regime based on institutionalized discrimination
Racism Repudiated and the that lasted in South Africa well into the 1990s. In some
Persistence of Prejudice of the more militant, extremist strands of movements for
Those who sought to develop a science of race or pro- liberation from racial oppression, such as some Black
moted racist ideologies in the nineteenth and early twen- Power organizations in the United States and settler
tieth centuries were no more successful than earlier Zionism in Palestine, reactive racist sentiments were nur-
thinkers had been in establishing meaningful, widely tured. Theories of race were also kept alive by scientists
agreed upon points of demarcation between different and social pundits who persisted in efforts to demon-
human groups, much less in setting forth acceptable, non- strate empirically that there were genetic differences, cen-
ethnocentric standards by which the superiority or infe- tered on intelligence quotient, or IQ, averages, in the
riority of different racial types might be judged. In the capacities of different human groups. But by the final
early decades of the twentieth century, when the influence decades of the twentieth century, the idea of race and the
of racist-charged ideologies and demagogues as well as racist prejudices and behavior that had been associated
racial discrimination at the everyday levels of social inter- with it for nearly half a millennium were rejected by the
action remained pervasive in societies across the globe, an overwhelming majority of scientists and social thinkers
intellectual counteroffensive was mounted. One of the worldwide.
prime movers of this assault on racist thinking was Franz
Michael Adas
Boas, a prominent German anthropologist who spent the
most productive decades of his distinguished career train- See also Colonialism; Ethnocentrism; Genocide; Holo-
ing graduate students in the United States, among whom caust; Slave Trades; Social Darwinism
were Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. Boas, the
anthropologists his teaching inspired, and allied ethnog-
Further Reading
raphers challenged the widespread assumption that
Adas, M. (1989). Machines as the measure of men: Science, technology,
racism had been validated by objective, culturally neutral,
and ideologies of western dominance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
scientific investigation.They also sought to supplant race Press.
or biological difference with an emphasis on cultural vari- Barkan, E. (1992). The retreat of scientific racism. Cambridge, UK: Cam-
bridge University Press.
ations in the study of human societies. By the early Curtin, P. (1964). The image of Africa: British ideas and action, 1780–
1940s, the genocidal nightmare that the Nazis unleashed 1850. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Fredrickson, G. (1971). Towards a social interpretation of the develop-
across Europe in the name of race purity and the racially
ment of African racism. In N. I. Huggins, et al. (Eds.), Key issues in the
charged war then raging in the Pacific generated wide- Afro-American experience. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
spread revulsion against racist social and political agen- Fredrickson, G. (2002). Racism:A short history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
das. In the decades that followed, the spread of Gould, S. (1981). The mismeasure of man. New York: Norton.
movements for independence organized by colonized Holt,T. (1995). Marking: Race, race-making, and the writing of history.
American Historical Review,100(1), 1–20.
peoples across Asia and Africa, as well as civil rights agi-
Jordan, W. (1968). White over black: American attitudes toward the
tation against the segregationist regimes in the American Negro, 1550–1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.