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to demonstrate the superiority of the Nordic peoples and to justify
the extreme anti-Semitism of Nazism which issued in the extinction
of millions of European Jews. The race theories of de Gobineau and
Chamberlain were also disseminated in other countries where they
were given different applications for different purposes. In the United
States, they were used to exalt the “older American stock” and to
restrict immigration of non-Nordic peoples to this country. They
were also used to assert the superiority of white Americans over
Negroes and to justify segregation and the subjection of Negroes to
the dominant white group. They have also been used in South Africa
as the basis for the maintenance in practice of white supremacy, al
though the official policy of the government there has been that of
seeking to preserve the complete separation of the races (
apartheid)
without asserting either the superiority or the inferiority of one racial
group. In actual practice, however,
apartheid
implies the superiority
of the dominant group in South Africa just as, according to the
Supreme Court, segregation in public schools as well as in parks and
on playgrounds and golf courses means an inferior status for the
Negro in the United States.
Exploitation of the colored peoples as slaves had been going on in
different parts of the world for more than two hundred years prior to
the time of de Gobineau. It had followed in the wake of the colonial
expansion of the countries of Western Europe. Throughout this period
Christians both in England and in America were divided in their
attitudes toward slavery. While most white Westerners who subdued
the colored peoples of Asia and Africa professed to be Christians,
there were some voices (John Woolman in America and John Wesley,
Granville Sharp, and William Wilberforce in England, for example)
which were raised in protest against the slave trade and also against
slavery itself. The number and influence of the latter increased until
they became at length an important factor leading to the abolition of
both of these evils throughout the civilized world.
Following the abolition of slavery, however, new methods of con
trolling and ostracizing the Negro by custom and law were devised
in the South,2 and indeed in other sections of the country comparable
2 See C. Vann Woodward,
The Strange Career of Jim Crow,
New York,
Oxford University Press, 1955. Professor Woodward shows that the Jim Crow
laws which established the present pattern of rigid segregation were not en
acted until the closing decade of the nineteenth century and the opening years
of the twentieth century. Prior to that time relations between the Negroes and
whites in the South were much less rigidly defined.
Race Relations
343