Summary Of George Fredrickson's Religion And The Invention Of Racism

George M. Fredrickson in his essay, Religion and the Invention of Racism, explains the

invention of racism based on religious, cultural, and ethnic grounds and its progression from

Europe to Africa and to North America through centuries. Fredrickson accounts these

discriminations between groups as solely being related to religion based on how people who

followed Christianity considered themselves as the superior one while the rest as inferior.

Associating Jews with Devil and witchcraft (90) with later discrimination based on the doctrine

of “limpieza de sangre” (purity of blood) (96), and the emphasis on the biblical Curse of Ham or

Canaan to explain the African pigmentation (101) was the religious root of discrimination in the

ancient world. Therefore,

According to the book of genesis, Ham sees his father Noah in

naked and drunken state and therefore mocks him. This action of Ham anger God and thus, God

criticizes all “Canaan’s descendants to be servant unto servants” (101). Therefore, people

associated blackness as a curse by god that justifies their lifetime servitude. The black Africans

were held slaves by white Christians and were asked to do low-status work. Similarly,

associating “devil” and “death”with their dark skin and considering them as “monstrous” and

“evil” shows how unfairly these black Africans were treated (93). The author further justifies the

racism between colors and the trading of slaves in the nineteenth century by using curse of Ham

or Canaan as a justification (102). To further justify religious roots as being the reason for

discrimination based on skin color, Fredrickson suggests that people discredited the notion of

climatic and environmental theories that could have separated the skin color (101). Skin

coloration is one of the cause for existing modern day racism which as Fredrickson