George Frederickson's Racism and United States/South African Comparisons

After spending much of his career comparing the United States and South Africa, George M. Fredrickson has now written a short history of racism.1 This is, of course, a bold undertaking, and let it be said at once that his book is both very readable and densely packed with illuminating and suggestive insights. After some discussion of the meaning of the term “racism,” Fredrickson begins with a survey of its origins. He moves from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the rise of modern forms of racism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Along the way, he inevitably draws a number of comparisons between different racial systems. What follows here is not a review of the book as a whole—that has been done elsewhere, most notably by Orlando Patterson2 —but is a commentary on what he says regarding the United States and South Africa, as a way of drawing the attention of those interested in comparing the two to Fredrickson’s ideas in his latest work. These ideas are of course in part drawn from his earlier comparative writing. It is indeed fortunate for those interested in such comparisons that so distinguished a scholar, a former President of the Organization of American Historians,3 who has described himself as a “heterosexual white male of Swedish-American ancestry,”4 should have devoted so much of his distinguished academic career to comparing aspects of race in these two societies