Stanford professor addresses racism

Stanford University professor and race relations expert George Fredrickson is charting the history of racism during a three-part lecture series at Princeton this week, beginning with a look at discrimination in medieval Europe and continuing through to the 20th century.

Fredrickson, who attended Harvard University and is a historian by trade, has spent much of his life studying the problems of racism in societies, both in America and elsewhere.

"I started out as a historian of American intellectual life in the Civil War," he said in an interview yesterday, explaining he soon became interested in exploring the views white people held toward blacks. He then began to compare racial attitudes in the United States with those in other countries, and it was this new interest that led him to study South Africa.

"I got absolutely fascinated by South Africa when I started reading about it," he said. "It was kind of unusual for me to go as deeply into South African history as I did."

After completing his 1981 book "White Supremacy" — which takes a comparative look at racial attitudes in America and South Africa — Fredrickson had planned to return to studying the United States exclusively.

"The book was well-received," Fredrickson said, though some critics claimed he focused his research too predominantly on whites. This criticism compelled him to continue studying South African apartheid, he said, and to write another book comparing the United States and South Africa, this time examining the civil rights movements in both countries.

Fredrickson's lecture series at the University is titled "Difference and Power: The Historical Construction of Racism." The first talk, which was held Tuesday night, tackled religious intolerance in the Middle Ages. Fredrickson examined the role of anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim sentiment in Christian Europe and the connection between religious prejudice and racism.

In his second lecture, held last night, Fredrickson compared white supremacy in 18thand 19th-century America with the experience of Jews in Germany during the same period.

Tonight's speech will consider racism in the 20th century, Fredrickson said. He will examine what he calls "racist regimes" — the Jim Crow American South, Nazi Germany and South Africa under apartheid. "Larger trends in world history helped to create and to destroy these regimes," he said. "There is a difference between racist regimes and racialized societies."