Fascism: Why Not Here?

6 Racism

123 RACISM ——6—— IN MODERN HISTORY, THERE have been only three overtly racist regimes, governments that have explicitly and legally recognized race as a basis for conferring differential rights and rewards. The most notorious was the Third Reich, which made Jewishness itself a crime and which set for itself the task of eliminating European Jewry through deportation and murder. The most recent was the apartheid regime of South Africa, a nation formed in 1948 but officially split into two castes—a ruling white minority and a subordinate black majority—in 1968. But the world’s first overtly racist regime was the Jim Crow South of the United States.1 This regime, which took root at the end of Reconstruction and lasted until the 1960s, served as a model for the other two to follow. It perfected methods of social and political disenfranchisement, economic subjugation, stigmatization, and separation that were thorough and effective. It elevated the concept of race to the level of both scientific fact and an article of faith, and it did so even under a national Constitution that guaranteed the rights of all Americans under the law. It was a remarkable achievement of political duplicity, if only for its endurance. Racial disparity was not restricted to the South. Many of the beliefs and structures that formed the underpinnings of the Jim Crow era were readily adopted throughout the rest of the country after blacks migrated there in large numbers early in the twentieth century. Examples include official or de facto segregation of residential neighborhoods, schools, amateur and professional sports, and the military; formal as well as informal barriers to membership in professional and social associations; overt discrimination 124 ❙ FASCISM: WHY NOT HERE? in higher education and employment; strong barriers against social or sexual contact between the races; and perhaps most insidious of all, the taken-for-granted assumption that the United States was a white nation. African Americans were not a uniquely disparaged caste. The country hadrid itself of most of the native population and confined the rest to reservations in the West, and the government had imposed a ban on Chinese immigration as well as racially based quotas for other groups. All this occurred despite the fact that America comprised more cultural and racial groups than anywhere else. Most Americans were immigrants themselves or recently descended from them and had felt the sting of at least informal discrimination. But upon integrating themselves into the American fabric—by becoming exemplars of the new man envisioned by the nineteenth-century nationalists—these Irish, Poles, Swedes, and the rest had been raised from the bottom of the social and economic pile. They were white, it mattered, and they were glad of it. Thus at the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States was clearly a far more racist country than was any nation in Europe. But Germany, not the United States, a few decades later would make racial extermination the hallmark of its political and social system, ultimately discrediting race forever as a basis for social order. The anti-Semitism that had long been a staple of religious and then nationalist thought became in the 1930s a central focus of National Socialist policy. What role, exactly, did anti-Semitism play in the rise of the National Socialists? The question might seem absurd for everyone knows the Nazis played on anti-Semitic hatreds that had smoldered within Germany since Martin Luther’s day and before. Hitler railed against world Jewry in Mein Kampf, clearly foreshadowing his intention to resolve the Jewish “question” once and for all. On the way to power, the Nazis nourished stereotypes and fears of der Jude in their political campaigns, and on achieving it they wasted no time in enacting all sorts of laws curtailing Jews’ political and social rights, ultimately resulting in the Jews’ near-annihilation. And the proof of it all lies in the ashy muck of Auschwitz and Majdanek and Treblinka and the rest, and in the identification tattoos of the dwindling community of survivors. Indeed, seen in hindsight the entire National Socialist era appears to have been the single-minded development of a vast apparatus whose sole purpose was to exterminate the Jewish people. But the problem with hindsight is, it makes historical events appear to have been planned, such that the results were foreseen from the beginning and destined to RACISM ❙ 125 turn out...