236 - White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History

White Supremacy:
A Comparative Study in American and South African History
By George M. Frederickson
New York, Oxford University Press, 1981. 356 pp. $18.95.

George M. Frederickson, William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University, has made a major contribution to the comparative study of black-white relations in the United States and South Africa. He has undertaken the enormously difficult task of separating the social, economic, political, and ideological threads that have had an impact on the way in which intergroup relationships have been structured in these two societies. He predicates his undertaking upon the perception that the valid basis for comparison between the two societies

… is not a primordial and predetermined aptitude for "racism" common to American and South African whites, but rather the emergence of long-term, historically conditioned tendencies leading to more self-conscious and rigorously enforced forms of racial domination-trends that were similar in general direction but surprisingly variable in rate of development, ideological expression, and institutional development (p. xix).

Frederickson deliberately rejected the use of the term "racism" in the title of the book because he believes that it has acquired a pejorative and moralistic overlay which makes its precise meanings elusive. He chose rather,to employ the term "White Supremacy," which is inclusive of the attitudes, ideologies, and policies associated with the rise of blatant forms of white or European dominance with "nonwhite" populations (p. xi). This is a wise choice because it makes possible the dissection of the history being examined with careful identification of elements which contribute to the unequal status of blacks and whites in the United States and South Africa, much as a surgeon explores a patient's physical condition on an operating table.

Having evoked a medical analogy in the preceding sentence, it might be useful to press it a bit further. Frederickson has written a basically optimistic book. He deliberately refrains from making value judgments about the events he examines, nor does he pronounce on the seriousness of his "objective findings" for the health of the body politic in either society. Nevertheless, he permits himself the judgment that the trend in the United States is towards more equity between blacks and whites, but he clearly is less optimistic about South Africa.

237 - White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History

This is in many ways a difficult book to read precisely because its scholarship is so careful and subtle. Rigorous adherence to his intention to do a comparative study has produced a work of considerable complexity. White Supremacy begins with the process of "Settlement and Subjugation, 1600-1840," and illuminates the ways in which superior military power yoked with ecological, economic, and political and religious realities contributed to the emergence of white supremacy in the period.

Frederickson sees major contributing factors in the rise of racial slavery in the tension or divisions within the white social structure and in the fact that "Africans and other non-Europeans were initially enslaved not so much because of their color and physical type as because of their legal and cultural vulnerability" (p. 70). He argues persuasively that in America the enslavement of blacks for life occurred in part because a slave in perpetual bondage was a better economic investment than the alternative of indentureship.

In his discussion of "Liberty, Union, and White Supremacy," Frederickson reinforces the idea which he had advanced earlier in his 1971 study of The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1871-1914. He demonstrates convincingly that the plight of blacks in South Africa and in America was exacerbated in the periods following the Second Boer War (1899-1902) and the War Between the States. White tribal interests resulted in concessions being made to racist elements in the society which resulted in the extremes of de facto and de jure segregation and discrimination in the Southern United States and to a lesser and more subtle degree in the North.

A major segment of the book consists of a thought-provoking delineation of the relationships between industrialism, white labor, and racial discrimination in the post-Reconstruction period. What emerges is the perception that the overwhelmingly economic interests of whites in the period were reinforced by emotional and ideological elements in "White Supremacy."

Though Frederickson demonstrates the complexities inherent in a developing industrial society involving not only labor, unions, government, and racial considerations, the simple result was the pervasiveness of the triumph of white supremacy. The book concludes with an updating of patterns of racial segregation in South Africa and the United States and offers some cautious optimism with respect to South Africa and a much more fulsome optimism for the United States.

My reading of this book parallels reading and reflection concerning the situation of blacks in the United States in the uneasy absence of full information of what "Reaganomics" will mean for this large minority. The resurgence of the Klan, the proposed cuts in programs affecting the poor, and the generalized low social and economic status of the overwhelming majority of blacks in the United States make me less

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sanguine about the achievement of racial justice and equality in the decades immediately ahead than Frederickson appears to be.

Lawrence N. Jones
Howard University Divinity School
Washington, D.C.