An Etymology of "Racism"

This post addresses the history of the word "racism" and how it came to be associated with power.  

The Origins of the Term "Racism"

From Politicsweb, the origins of the term "racism" go back to the term "racialism" used in the early 1900s regarding the Dutch and British in South Africa.  However, "racism" is not used until the 1930s to describe anti-Jewish policies in fascist Italy and Germany.  As the link above points out, 

In the New York Times’ archive there are, in fact, two pre-1936 references to “racism”, both from James G McDonald, League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Jewish and other) coming from Germany.
The first is from a brief news report on 17 June 1935 quoting McDonald as using the term “racism” in relation to Adolf Hitler’s “contagious” anti-Jewish doctrines in a speech to the annual convention of Brith Sholom in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the day before.

The use of racism to describe the fascist anti-Jewish sentiment is also documented in the online dictionary of etymology.

However, by the end of his history of the term "racism," James Myburgh, a South African journalist and editor of Politicsweb, makes a compelling case that the reason why Jews were targeted in Germany and Italy was because they held enviable positions in banking, science and other areas of society.

I would counter that Myburgh has a point that Jews had achieved a level of success that raised the attention of fascists in Germany and Italy, but nonetheless, Jews did not have the political or social power to prevent the horrible violence that would be directed toward them.  Myburgh is missing the forest for the trees.  Race is a societal creation and should be viewed on a societal level.  That means viewing Germany as a whole and Italy as a whole.  This might be applied to the U.S. as many people with power have been minimized because of their race:

• As a State Senator, Barrack Obama once was mistaken for a waiter, and another time he was mistaken for a valet.  
• Sterling Brown, a player for the Milwaukee Bucks, was tased and arrested for a parking violation.
• Henry Louis Gates, a prominent Harvard University professor, was arrested after police were called because he was trying to open his home's front door which was stuck.
• Serena Williams has endured multiple incidents of racism.
• Douglas Zeigler, a black NYC police chief who was off duty was harassed by another NYC police officer.

All of these people maintain positions of power but their positions are within a larger society that positions whites above other races.  In any case, the origins of the use of the term "racism" began with the treatment of Jews during WWII Europe.  Notably, there is a documented history of Nazi Germany adopting many of the U.S. race laws and policies - documented in Time and in the Atlantic.

The Connection of Power to Racism

Although the treatment of Jews in WWII was termed racist and the U.S. defeated the Nazi regime, the treatment of Americans who are black continued to be extremely unequal;  segregation, lynchings and unequal treatment continued despite calls for it to be dismantled.  In 1948 President Truman inched toward equality by ordering the desegregation of the Armed Forces.  It would be 20 years after that President Truman signs the Fair Housing Act.

It was under this backdrop that educational psychology professor Patricia Bidol-Padva published her 1970 book Developing New Perspectives on Race: An Innovative Multi-media Social Studies Curriculum in Racism Awareness for the Secondary Level in which she defined racism as prejudice plus power.   This begins a social science paradigm for understanding racism as a connection to power.  One reason that power was an important component in 1970 was that although a 20-year struggle for civil rights had just taken place with numerous laws being in place to theoretically protect Americans who were perceived as black, it is far from arguable that there was equality in the U.S.  In other words, by law, all Americans were equal, but in every day, Americans seen as black were still not anywhere near as equal in terms of power, jobs, wealth, income, or even respect.  And, as social scientist Keith Dowding notes in his book, the Encyclopedia of Power, in a system of racial classification, the group in power creates the classification system, so racism can't exist without a dominant group creating a system of race.  

Shortly after Bidol-Padva introduced power to racism, William Julius Wilson etched it into academic consciousness.   Wilson is an immensely important University of Chicago sociologist specializing in race.  Wilson's 1973 book Power Racism and Privilege: Race Relations in Theoretical and Sociohistorical Perspectives furthers the connection of racism and power.  As Thomas Pettigrew explains in his review, 

"A dynamic interrelationship exists between power andRacismThe dimensions of each concept cannot be appreciated without treating it in the context of the other."

The Problem with Language

Language is constantly evolving and this is true for terms like "racism" as detailed by Racist is a Tough Little Word; The Definition Has Grown and Shifted Over Time in the Atlantic by John McWhorter.  Because of this changing nature, words like "racism" have specific meanings within academia but may be used very differently in everyday language.

 

Additionally, being able to talk about the term "racism" is made more difficult by the way that "racist" has become a term that many use as a complete denigration of someone's character.  This creates a knee-jerk reaction and unwillingness to admit any racial infraction.  As we learned about in lesson 1 of this unit, this reaction is sometimes called white fragility.

From NPR's Codeswitch,

Racism remains a force of enormous consequence in American life, yet no one can be accused of perpetrating it without a kicking up a grand fight. No one ever says, "Yeah, I was a little bit racist. I'm sorry." That's in part because racists, in our cultural conversations, have become inhuman.  They're fairy-tale villains, and thus can't be real.

There's no nuance to these public fights, as a veteran crisis manager told my colleague, Hansi Lo Wang. Someone is either a racist and therefore an inhuman monster, or they're an actual, complex human being, and therefore, by definition, incapable of being a racist.

Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic, who often writes about race, is one of several writers and thinkers who has drawn attention to this paradox:

The idea that America has lots of racism but few actual racists is not a new one. Philip Dray titled his seminal history of lynching At the Hands of Persons Unknown because most "investigations" of lynchings in the South turned up no actual lynchers. Both David Duke and George Wallace insisted that they weren't racists. That's because in the popular vocabulary, the racist is not so much an actual person but a monster, an outcast thug who leads the lynch mob and keeps *Mein Kampf *in his back pocket.

Conclusion 

Overall, I tend to not emphasize definitions and memorization of very specific and nuanced vocabulary.  I am much more concerned with the big picture and the ideas that students take away.  In the case of the term "racism," here is what you should know:

• Many scholars/academics will connect racism to power.  
• Race only exists because a power structure created it and by extension, racism can only exist because of that power structure.  
• Whether you personally connect race to power in your everyday lexicon is less important than recognizing that racism does in fact exist and is very much connected to a legacy of policies that have unequally distributed power throughout U.S. history.  
• That unequal distribution still has consequences and implications for today's reality.

Extra

Bobo and Fox provide a useful review of race, racism, and discrimination in this 2003 article published by the American Sociological Association.