It has been said that Hitler gave racism a bad name. While the ideology undoubtedly existed before the 1930s, it was only then that the term came into common usage to describe the theories on which Nazis based their persecution of Jews. Nuala Haughey reviews Racism: A Short History, by George M. Fredrickson and Racism and Antiracism in Ireland, edited by Lenin and McVeigh.
Racism: A Short History charts the rise and decline of this "scavenger ideology" from its foundations in anti-Jewish attitudes in medieval Europe to its climax in early 20th-century Germany and America and its survival into the new millennium.
Prof George M. Fredrickson's book is a widely sourced, authoritative and distilled account of the career of the two main expressions of Western ideological racism; anti-Semitism and white supremacy.
While it is a scholarly endeavour, the book has a lightness of touch which makes it accessible to the non-academic reader interested in exploring the roots of racial belief systems which have so dramatically shaped world history.
The Stanford University professor deftly positions racism in its political, geo-political, economic and religious contexts, focusing largely on the West, where the ideology was carried to its ultimate extreme while simultaneously being condemned within the same cultural tradition which presumed human equality.
He takes care to define what he means by racism, exhaustively distinguishing it from the likes of ethnocentric distrust of the "other", tribalism, xenophobia, religious intolerance or general group prejudice.
Prof Fredrickson argues that the first real anticipation of modern racism was the religious intolerance shown in 15th- and 16th-century Spain towards Jewish converts who were stigmatized for having impure blood, making them incapable of true conversion to Christianity.
He writes that when "the status of large numbers of people was depressed purely and simply because of their derivation from a denigrated ethnos, a line had been crossed that gave 'race' a new and more comprehensive significance".
By contrast, the other principal form of modern racism, the colour-coded, white-black variety, did not have significant medieval roots but was mainly a product of the modern period. Fredrickson contends that the Enlightenment was a precondition for the growth of a modern racism based on physical typology, as 18th-century ethnologists categorised human types or "races".
Moving to the last century, Prof Fredrickson places the success of the American civil rights movement in outlawing legalised racial segregation and discrimination in the 1960s in the context of the growing sense that national interests were threatened when blacks in the US were mistreated. With the Cold War and the competition with the Soviet Union for the "hearts and minds" of independent Africans and Asians, the American south had become a national embarrassment with possible strategic consequences.
While Prof Fredrickson's book is enhanced by its detached tone, the exact opposite is the case in a collection of 14 essays by academics and activists in Ireland.
Racism and Anti-Racism in Ireland aims to be an "authoritative academic text" on racism in Ireland, but it is made all the more interesting for the recounted experiences of its contributors.
It is a comprehensive book, drawing together many diverse strands in a bid to define Irish racism and also the racialisation of Irishness itself.
The personal and moving testimonies in the book by contributors including Drazen Nozinic, a Croatian refugee, and Rosaleen McDonagh, a disabled Traveller activist, add an extra pertinence.
The book is edited by Ronit Lentin, co-ordinator of TCD's Mphil in Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Dr Robbie McVeigh, a Belfast-based researcher and activist. Both also contribute chapters.
They maintain that the "new forms of Irish racism" to emerge in recent years developed out of older manifestations of Irish racism such as anti-Semitism, anti-Traveller racism and racism against Black-Irish people.
The book documents how Irish racism, in the classic scavenger mode discussed by Prof Fredrickson, has taken on new and frightening forms in recent years. In particular, it explores the dynamic of racism focusing on asylum-seekers, refugees and other migrants, the "racist undertones" of Ireland's immigration and asylum policies as well as the often overtly racist public discourse.
Prof Fredrickson discusses in his book how, if culture is essentialised, it can be the functional equivalent of "race". Contemporary British sociologists have identified and analysed what they call "the new cultural racism" with race coded as culture. This is where qualities of social groups are made natural, fixed, confined within a pseudo-biologically defined culturalism. In Ireland today, where the word refugee has become a term of abuse instead of the description of a person's legal status as someone fleeing persecution, the scavenger has found a new vulnerable prey.
Nuala Haughey is Social and Racial Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times
Racism: A Short History. By George M. Fredrickson. Princeton University Press, Oxfordshire, 216 pp. £15.95 sterling
Racism and Antiracism in Ireland. Edited by Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh. Beyond the Pale Publications, Belfast, 256 pp. £10.99 sterling