One thing I have noticed during my 1949 media diet is that hardly anyone used the word “racism” back then.
That got me to wondering.
I searched my Kindle, which has hundreds of books. The earliest use of the word “racism” was by Martin Luther King, Jr in 1963. Then Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael use it. Then comes the flood. But before that, nothing.
You do not see the word “racism” in:
- “The Fire Next Time” (1963) by James Baldwin,
- “The Invisible Man” (1952) by Ralph Ellison,
- “Black Boy” (1945) by Richard Wright,
- “The Mis-Education of the Negro” (1933) by Carter G. Woodson,
- “The Souls of Black Folk” (1903) by Du Bois,
- “The Red Record” (1895) by Ida B. Wells,
Nor in Frederick Douglass’ speeches. Nothing.
Then I searched Google Books, which has millions of books and magazines from the past 500 years.
In 1949 “racism” does not appear once in Google Books.
From 1940 to 1949, I found only two cases:
- “Racism, a world issue” (1947) by Edmund Davison Soper,
- Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, Volumes 22-24 (1944-46) by the National Urban League.
Note: The Google search brings up 18 matches, but only in these two cases did “racism” appear in material that seems to have been written in the forties and not, say, in an introduction or footnote written much later.
Google Books lets you see only bits of Soper’s book, but all of the Urban League’s magazine, which used it six times from 1944 to 1946.
The Urban League in 1944:
“When we come to the new material we find Racism discussed dispassionately. It is a paramount question of the post-war world. It is the theory of the master race and constitutes a menace to the human race.”
That is from a book review of “The Race Question and the Negro” (1943) by John LaFrage, S.J.
Hitler’s Germany was the main example of “racism”, but parallels were being drawn to race relations in the United States.
Was the NAACP silent about racism? No, they just called it something else.
Here is Walter White, then its leader, in 1949:
“Suppose the skin of every Negro in America were suddenly to turn white. What would happen to all the notions about Negroes, the idols on which are built race prejudice and race hatred? Would not Negroes then be judged individually on their ability, energy, honesty, cleanliness as are whites? How else could they be judged?”
He clearly has racism in mind but calls it “race prejudice and race hatred”. Likewise, H.G. Wells in 1920 called it race prejudice.
In Google Books, “prejudice against Negroes” reaches its height between 1940 and 1975. The phrase “racism against Negroes” never appears, not once, and “racism against blacks” not till 1961.
The term “race prejudice” pictures it as personal and psychological, as a bad habit of mind, a character flaw. That is how most white people in the United States still seem to think of it in 2017.
The term “racism”, race + ism, pictures it as a set of ideas about race, particularly those that favour a given race, on the model of the word nationalism.
– Abagond, 2017.
Sources: Google Books Ngram Viewer, Opportunity (1944), Look (1949), Stories of London (image).
See also:
530
The linked article says the OED’s first recorded use of the word racism in English was by an white American in 1902. The article then explores the “checkered legacy on race” of this man, who was the founder of Carlisle, the first of the Indian boarding schools.
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/01/05/260006815/the-ugly-fascinating-history-of-the-word-racism
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Etymology Online says, “There are isolated uses of racism from c. 1900” but it doesn’t really come into “continual use” until the mid-1930s as a borrowing of the French word racisme, “originally in the context of Nazi theories.” Racism and racist “replaced earlier racialism (1871) and racialist (1917), both often used early 20c. in a British or South African context.”
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=racist
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I told u 1936 like beer hall putsch
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The french? Sacre bleu vichy
I guess what do u do as a regularish person is the question for the ages
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Reblogged this on Project ENGAGE.
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Reblogged this on Raimanet and commented:
http://tiny.ph/nyFN -> le regard du jugement
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I have never thought about the word racism as being anything other than an expression of the feeling of superiority of one group over another.
Since my youth was under the Jim Crow laws of the United States and the subtle elimination of blacks from many positions in the northern states a word did not have to be expressed. There were white people and there were black people. There were other people also. There were jobs that black people got and there were jobs that black people did not get.
There was no question about the difference between people in the years prior to 1948, when Truman signed the Integration Bill. Whites and Blacks were separated. There were white baseball and basketball teams and black baseball and basketball teams. It all was natural.
Seventy-nine (79) years later times have changed. We have had our first almost everyone by now so it is correct to say that that was then and this is now.
Racism is important now because whites need to find a way to say that they do not get jobs because some inferior black has it.
Since it was important that Mrs. Clinton did not get to be president, we now have an individual in the Office of the Presidency who will advocate and make possible the setting back of black progress many years.
The word racism will pale in importance as the President rolls back the benefits of blacks.
Please write some articles about the many Executive Orders that are being put into place to deny the protections of our race. See the Attorney General move back to maximum sentences and the president recommending harsh treatment for those individuals who are arrested. Did you hear his words about the alt-right calling them good people, after they were marching through the streets.
So, what is a word when all that is taking place.
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