Chapter 2 Analysis and Reflection

1. Reread Reading 1, “What Do We Do with a Difference?” What responses to differences between people occur in the history presented in this chapter? What were the consequences of those responses?

2. Scholar George Fredrickson writes that racism has two components: difference and power. He explains:

It originates from a mindset that regards “them” as different from “us” in ways that are permanent and unbridgeable. This sense of difference provides a motive or rationale for using our power advantage to treat the Other in ways that we would regard as cruel or unjust if applied to members of our own group.60

How is Fredrickson’s definition of racism reflected in the history of slavery in North America? How is it reflected in the histories of antisemitism and imperialism?

3. What is antisemitism? In what sense is antisemitism a form of religious prejudice? In what sense is it a form of racism?

4. What have you learned about the forces that shape a nation’s universe of obligation? What have you learned about the forces that shape an individual’s universe of obligation?

5. This chapter introduced many different ideas about the evolution of the concept of race. What echoes of these ideas do you recognize in our world today?

6. Why do humans so often divide themselves into “we” and “they”? When does it become a problem? What historical examples from this chapter help you answer this question? What examples from the world today help you answer it?

60 George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 9.

* The Indigenous Peoples of the Americas are not a single homogenous group. This term—as well as terms used in the United States, such as Native American and American Indian—refers to hundreds of culturally diverse groups who inhabited the Americas before Europeans settled there.

* The word Gypsy has been commonly used to refer to two distinct ethnic groups, the Sinti and the Roma, who migrated to Europe from northern India in the 1400s. Europeans called members of these groups Gypsies because they erroneously believed that these people had migrated from Egypt. It is more appropriate to refer to individuals from these groups by the specific names Sinti or Roma.