RACISM. — A term that entered usage in Italy (and in France: racisme) beginning in 1935–38,
to designate a doctrine and a political practice relating to race, National Socialism (v.), shortly before it established itself as a totalitarian regime in Germany.
The doctrine was based essentially on the asserted predominant role assumed, in the course of historical events and the consequent development of human civilization, by the simultaneous existence of superior races endowed with capacities for command, creation, and invention, and of inferior races suited purely to executive tasks, capable only of carrying out critical, disintegrating, and dissolving activities if not appropriately restrained and guided. The political practice dictated by the doctrinal assertions mentioned above aimed, through extensive legislative action, to ensure the political and social predominance of the race deemed superior over the one, or those, considered inferior, while also seeking to safeguard and strengthen its purity and health for the future. Following the German example, the expression r. soon also acquired a distinctly antisemitic meaning, on the grounds that the European Aryan populations were supposedly facing the imminent danger of being irreparably contaminated by the Jewish communities admitted into their territories during the preceding centuries. In Italy, the Fascist government, initially alien to r., embraced it in 1938 by promulgating antisemitic laws within the country and against miscegenation in the colonies; but, owing to the opposition of the Church and, in general, of the population, r. assumed persecutory forms only during the German occupation.
Besides an iniquitous differentiation of status in law among citizens themselves within their respective states, the doctrine and political practice mentioned above also gave rise to an alarming tendency on the part of powers that considered themselves populated by superior races to impose their hegemony upon neighboring ethnic groups, classified as an inferior race; a result achieved, for example, by National Socialist Germany, albeit only fleetingly, by grafting the new pseudo-scientific racial concepts onto the Pan-Germanist axioms of the recent past (v. PANGERMANISM). It was clear, moreover, that an irreconcilable antithesis immediately arose between the doctrine and political practice of r. and the precepts of Catholic morality, which teaches the equality of all human beings in Christ, and of democratic practice, which postulates the equality and freedom of all citizens, irrespective of sex, race, language, or religious confession.
The doctrinal antecedents of r. are very numerous; but, confining ourselves to the more recent decades, it is enough to recall the writings of the Frenchman J. A. Gobineau and the Englishman H. S. Chamberlain, who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, upheld the absolute superiority of the Aryan race (existing in its purest state, according to Chamberlain among the Anglo-Saxons and according to Gobineau among the Germans).
As precedents of the political practice, one must instead recall the numerous expedients devised in North America to keep the large Negro population (introduced there from the sixteenth century onward), the remnants of the Native American tribes, and also not a few immigrants of poorer races (Slavs, Latins, etc.) in a condition of clear legal and social inferiority; noting, however, in this regard that, beyond and more than actual legislative discriminations, numerous customary and extralegal practices and impositions, traditionally maintained, have often been effective in this respect, such as complete separation in everyday life, extended to public premises and means of transportation, privileges in hiring, prohibition from attending institutions of higher education, lynching, etc.
At present, one may recall the renewed flourishing of r. that occurred in the Union of South Africa after the Nationalist Party of Malan came to power in 1948 (whose electoral program affirmed the necessity of absolute “segregation” for the colored races: a principle known as apartheid).
e nazione, Brescia 1938; E. Vermeil, Le racisme allemand, Paris 1939; M. Bendiscioli, Neopaganesimo razzista, 3rd ed., Brescia 1945; L. Poliakov, Breviare de la haine*, Paris 1952.
Paolo Biscaretti di Ruffia