Fascism, Jim Crow & the Roots of Racism: Tracing the Origins

Robert Connell

This idyllic rendition of a farm scene obscures the horrific reality for the slave who produced for the sugar mills of 16th century Brazil.

ISASBEL WILKERSON’S 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, adapted as the film Origin by Ava DuVerney in 2023, presents an expansive study of the origin and function of racism in the United States. Wilkerson finds that ideologies of race serve to obscure the existence of a caste system that structures social hierarchies in America.(1)

As well as describing the functional linkages between U.S. racial stratification and the ancient Indian caste system, among the most intriguing and provocative aspects of Wilkerson’s work is her recounting of how the Nazis in the 1930s studied American race laws for guidance and inspiration as they themselves attempted to institutionalize racism early in their regime.

The United States, which stood at the time as the world’s leading racist jurisdiction, provided a generative case study for Hitler’s legal scholars as they examined Supreme Court briefs “whose arguments were indistinguishable from those of the Nazis.” (Wilkerson, 81)

Guiding their research and of particular interest to the Nazis was how to translate their racial ideology into the clarity, consistency and enforceability of a formal legal system, knowing full well that the extent of what they planned to do was unprecedented in German history.

This endeavor would culminate in the infamous Nuremburg Laws of 1935, a series of legal codes that stripped Jews of their citizenship and segregated them from society effectively rendering them an underclass within German society, paving the road to the Nazi holocaust.

The Nuremburg Laws would be expanded to Romani people and Black Germans soon thereafter.

The now well-documented linkages between American racism and Nazi policy was extensively analyzed in the works of James Q. Whitman, from which Wilkerson draws in her analysis of the subject.(2) Furthermore, in their studies of fascism, both journalist Paul Mason(3) and historian Robert O. Paxton(4) identify racism as a central intellectual foundation of the movement.

Yet a full accounting of this relationship cannot be restricted to the 1930s or the period of historical fascism in Europe. Indeed, this topic invites further exploration into the common roots of racial ideology emerging in the Western world long before the rise of the Third Reich or Jim Crow segregation.

These are philosophical origins that Nazism and U.S. racism share, stretching back to the period of transatlantic slavery and the rise of white supremacy in the era of European colonialism. Thus my main goal in this article is to provide a snapshot of the history of white supremacy as a racial ideology reproduced over the course of centuries, of which American segregation and German fascism were prime examples.

In so doing, I will describe the historical context of how traditional conceptions of human difference and hierarchy — always unstable and needing to be reinforced and reproduced through violence — enabled and structured the exploitative and colonial capacities of capitalism as a world system in its formative years and beyond. This will provide a basis for understanding how the legacy of slavery and white supremacy contributed to the formation of fascism in our own times.

The contours of the historical development of race as a social construct, the role of racism in cohering the social order of the United States, and the precise ideological origins and definition of fascism are all hotly debated subjects.

We will not resolve those debates here, and an extensive analysis of these topics is far beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say, I will make an argument about how slavery and settler colonialism produced and contributed to the ideological circumstances from which both segregation and fascism arose.

I will draw from a diverse set of scholars including Howard W. French (whose recent book Born in Blackness I reviewed for ATC 232), Isabel Wilkerson, the historian Barbara Fields, and the literary historian Sven Lindqvist, whose 1996 book Exterminate All the Brutes provides a historical and philosophical investigation of the roots of racism and colonial genocide.

Finally, I should note that this article draws very similar conclusions about the nature and origins of racism to Arun Kundnani in his book What Is Anti-racism? And Why It Means Anti-capitalism (see Dianne Feely’s review in ATC 230), albeit with different inflections.

Whereas Kundnani assesses competing definitions of racism and strategies to fight it, I focus on the historical co-development of ideologies of racial difference and doctrines of genocide in the context of European colonialism, so as to better understand and combat their reproduction today.

The Meaning of “Race”

It would be wise to establish exactly what I mean by race, given its varied and sometimes contradictory meanings in scholarship and colloquial language. Race is the idea that humans are naturally divided into categories based on biological, physical characteristics. Race is also defined as immutable, that is, your race cannot be changed.

Although ideas of race and ethnicity often overlap, they are distinct concepts. Ethnicity is the confluence of culture and kinship which, by definition, is mutable; unlike the fixed status of race, one can adapt a different culture or change one’s kin.(5)

Following Barbara Fields’ exploration of race as a socio-historical construct, I position race as an ideology of human difference that came into existence at identifiable historical moments for identifiable historical reasons.(6)

This is the materialist approach, that is, an understanding of race as a concept of human division emerging from historical and socio-economic processes, rather than any essential or biological reality. Although race is a biological fiction, however, that does not diminish the immense influence that the perception of racial difference has on important life outcomes such as wealth, education, employment, housing, health disparities and social status.

“Ideologies are not delusions but [are] real, as real as the social relations for which they stand … but it does not follow that they are scientifically accurate.” (Fields, 110)

Therefore, although race may be a social construct rather than a biological reality, the impact and power of racial ideology, as well as the lived experienced of race, are all very real.

In the interest of identifying one of the most significant historic moments in the development of the ideology of race, I begin my analysis in late medieval Europe and West Africa. Howard French argues that it was during the 14th and 15th centuries that a thirst for African gold spurred Europe’s initial overseas colonial projects, a process which established the first iteration of racial ideology.

The Kingdom of Portugal was an early adopter of Arabian sailing technology and cartography allowing for trans-oceanic travel, and was able to establish the first European colonial outposts on the West African coastline to facilitate the accumulation of gold. This, in turn, would lay the foundation for another economic revolution, the mass production of sugar using enslaved labor:

“Framed at its simplest, gold had led the Portuguese to slaves, and slaves drove the expansion of a lucrative new industry, sugar, which would transform the world like few products have in history, and in doing so would also produce one of history’s greatest human tolls.”(7)

The operation of these early sugar mills would grow into the foundation of a new mode of capitalist production that would accelerate European economic integration and lift the continent out of its long, medieval stagnation. (French, 116)

Thus we arrive at one possible catalyst for the origin of racialization (that is, the process of people being identified as a race), a moment where enslavement based on religion, geography or legal punishment began to shift toward enslavement based on incipient racial typologies.

Starting in the 1440s, the Portuguese launched their first slave raids on the coastline of newly-explored West Africa in order to feed the labor needs of their new, first-generation, sugar mills in Madeira. And in 1452, through the Dum Diversas proclamation, Pope Nicholas V authorized Portuguese King Afonso V to “invade, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens [Muslims], pagans, and other enemies of Christ, to put them into perpetual slavery, and to take away all their possessions and property.”(8)

Note that the Dum Diversas proclamation still established the objectives of imperial conquest and enslavement along religious, rather than overtly racial lines.(9) But according to French, it was in this context that the black skin color of the captives began to be associated in European eyes with the supposed barbarity of Africans which, combined with medieval Christian religious doctrines justifying the enslavement of “pagans,” provided a juridical rationale for slavery.

In fact, French identifies a possible “index case” or first victim of what would become the transatlantic slave trade of dark-skinned Africans. A “black Mooress” captured by the Portuguese on the coast of present-day Mauritania in 1441, along with nine others during that same expedition, was transported to Portugal to be sold. (French, 67)

Contemporary observations on the nature and humanity of the Africans were ambivalent. A royal scribe who witnessed the sale described this first shipment of West African captives as being “brute animals” with “savage feelings” while simultaneously being perceived as “sons of Adam,” that is, fellow humans. (68)

Nonetheless, the contrast between white skin being positive and black skin being uncivilized is apparent in these reports. French argues this was the beginning of European association with black skin and enslavement. And yet, the works of historians Robin Blackburn and David M. Goldberg show that Europeans also adopted Arab attitudes, mobilized within their own African slave trade that predated European colonialism by centuries, linking Blackness with servitude.(10)

Furthermore, the racist biblical myth of Noah’s Curse of Ham serving as justification for the perpetual enslavement of Black Africans is a trope found in all Abrahamic religions.(11) Finally, the association of black color with sin and the Devil stretches back into early Christian culture. (Blackburn, 92)

Ultimately, I do not think historians will ever pinpoint a singular, original moment of the racialization of Africans; it is an historical process unfolding over centuries with many twists, turns, and repetitions.

We do know that in this early period of European conquest in the Atlantic World, traditional, religiously-bound conceptions of human difference and hierarchy were reproduced as anti-Black racism within the political, economic and colonial dynamics of capitalism in its emergent period.

With the rise of sugar plantation slavery and its replication in the New World, Black complexion became the common marker of the slave labor force, and thus the most convenient identification of slave status, where one’s own skin automatically betrayed you as a slave and impeded escape. This technique of domination, predicated on the growing exclusivity of West and Central Africa as a source for captive workers, ensured that the process of chattel enslavement at the dawn of modernity in the Atlantic World was firmly racialized.

Multiple permutations of racial ideology would emerge in the early colonial world as various European empires founded colonies whose exploitative and genocidal function required the establishment of rigid hierarchies between rulers and the conquered.

One such example is the American context of settler colonialism. As described by Barbara Fields, in the foundational period of American colonization we find a historical process in which the expediencies of controlling an unfree labor force, both African and European, led to the reproduction and further refinement of racial ideology.

Just as during the first decades of European colonialism in the Atlantic World with the rise of the Portuguese Empire, the advent of race in the United States is an outcome of the social relation of slavery, rather than the other way around.

To illustrate this, Fields brings us to the early history of Virginia where shared conditions between enslaved Africans and English indentured laborers, treated little better than slaves despite their European patrimony, became a great liability for the colonial government. (Fields, 104-5)

Howard Pyle’s “The Burning of Jamestown” (1905) portrays poor whites who rebelled, but fails to show the slaves who revolted with them.

Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, during which free Black people, enslaved Black people, and white indentured laborers rose up in alliance against the Virginia aristocracy is the prime example here.(12) We should remember, however, that the rebellion was also predicated on the accelerated dispossession of Native Americans, and so its usefulness as an example of multiracial class solidarity is limited.

Nonetheless, in the aftermath of this failed rebellion, a series of slave codes, constantly refined, set the stage for the emergence of racial ideology and ensured that chattel slavery would act to subsume class tensions that would have erupted among whites in its absence.

In essence, through these slave codes, the bottom strata of the working class became racially constructed, while descendants of white indentured servants became free yeoman peasants in such a way that shielded them from the most exploitative aspects of capitalism, the brunt of which was now borne by the Africans. Class exploitation became identified with racial exploitation.

Even as this trend rose in the 17th century, the concept of race was slow to follow. Laws dictating the free or slave status of children at that time, for example, identified nationality and religion as the division, not race.

As plantation slavery grew to dominate the South, however, the increasingly severe legal apparatus required to maintain the supposed property rights of slaveholders, and the segregation of free people from the enslaved, mandated and disciplined social behaviors and rituals that would come to take on an ideological rationale for racialization. (Fields, 106-8)

Expediting Capitalist Production

Put another way, similar to the Portuguese Empire in the late medieval period, once again we see traditional, religiously-bound conceptions of human difference and hierarchy reproduced as anti-Black racism for the practical expediency of capitalist production — and in the context of settler colonialism, the need to pacify class struggle by preventing white workers from making common cause with Black workers.

Yet that process is never complete, and ideologies of race, with their attendant modes of violence, are inherently unstable and need to be constantly reproduced and verified in social life.

For example, even when slavery was formally abolished at the end of the Civil War, ushering in the hope for Black citizenship and upward mobility during the Reconstruction era of the 1860s and ’70s, lynching, segregation, race riots, the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, incarceration and eugenics served to reassert white dominance and reproduce the ideology of white supremacy.(13)

In particular, the developments of scientific racism in the 19th century, as exemplified by eugenics, would have far-reaching global consequences and serve as a philosophical rootstock for the fascist movements that would emerge in Europe in the 20th century.

In his book Exterminate All the Brutes, Sven Lindqvist finds that over the course of the 19th century, as European colonialism was reaching the pinnacle of expansion to all corners of the world, a great many Europeans “interpreted military superiority as intellectual and even biological superiority.”(14)

At a time when the religious doctrines that previously upheld racial ideology were breaking down in the face of the scientific revolution, some prominent European intellectuals sought to justify their already-held racist prejudices with scientific rigor. This was the era of racist pseudo-science: phrenology, polygenism, and the crudest, most distorted applications of physical anthropology, among other self-serving falsities.

Lindqvist draws one particularly odious example, the Scottish anatomist, zoologist and former colonial army medic Robert Knox, to exemplify this profound shift in racial ideology.

In his 1850 book The Races of Man, Knox went further than the typical racist typologies popular at the time and expound that the “dark races,” whether Blacks, Jews or Native Aimé Césaire Americans, were all destined for extermination in the face of the Anglo-Saxon race. Race was, thus, the decisive factor in determining the destiny of all human populations. (Lindqvist, 124-29)

Whereas some colonizers had justified the early genocides of European imperialism as resulting from the unavoidable expediencies of domination and capital accumulation, or perhaps God’s vengeance against heathens and non-believers,(15) now, as the technical means of mass death were being perfected through the industrial revolution, genocide was deemed an unavoidable process of evolution itself, as natural as the extinction of the dinosaurs or woolly mammoths.

Indeed, given the supposed inevitability of destruction for non-white races, members of the Anthropological Society of London, founded by followers of Knox, would argue that colonial massacres of indigenous people were actually acts of mercy and progress. (Lindqvist, 129-30)

Unsurprisingly, the Society also defended the Confederacy during the Civil War on the basis of the biological inferiority of Black people. As a measure of how mainstream such views became in the 19th century, in 1871 the Anthropological Society of London would expand into the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, which remains one of the world’s oldest and preeminent anthropological organizations.(16)

The core thesis of Exterminate All the Brutes is that the doctrine of entire races of people being destined for death is a fundamental idea of the 19th century. I have argued that this idea, in turn, was a radicalization of previous racial ideologies supporting the organizational and intellectual requirements of mass enslavement and colonial conquest stretching back to the late medieval period.

Genocide Before Nazism

In the words of Sven Lindqvist, the hegemony of such ideas in the Western world meant that a yet-unborn Adolf Hitler need not have attended Dr. Knox’s lectures or the proceedings of the Anthropological Society of London to develop his ideas:

“He had no need to. He knew it already. The air he and all other Western people in his childhood breathed was soaked in the conviction that imperialism is a biologically necessary process, which, according the laws of nature, leads to the inevitable destruction of the lower races. It was a conviction which had already cost millions of human lives before Hitler provided his highly personal application.” (Lindqvist, 141)

It was a conviction that compelled the Martiniquan poet and socialist Aimé Césaire to write that Europeans tolerated “Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.”(17)

It was a conviction that anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells knew all too well when she campaigned against Jim Crow segregation and the unequal application of the law, belief in white racial purity and superiority, state-supported white terrorism and violence, authoritarian governance, suppression of democracy, and systematic sexual violence inherent to that system.

Although operating decades before the introduction of the term fascism by Mussolini, Jeanelle Hope and Bill Mullen argue that Wells had meticulously observed and documented how white supremacist racial ideology emerging from the antebellum period had reproduced and reconstituted itself as what, in hindsight, can be categorized as anti-Black fascism.(18)

And so, when a group of Nazi officials and legal scholars gathered in a room on June 5, 1934 to seek guidance and instruction from American race laws in establishing the juridical edifice of Hitler’s state, they encountered a kindred ethos and saw their own intellectual and philosophical heritage reflecting back at them.

Yet as one final example of the instability and imprecision of the reproduction of racial ideology across space and time, even the Nazis were not able to completely adapt American race laws to their own conditions. In fact, they found that the American one-drop rule (where even “one drop of Negro blood” meant that one was classified as Black) to be too harsh, too extreme, and too radical even for the Nazi party. (Wilkerson, 88)

I will end by noting Robin D. G. Kelley’s identification of Trumpism as the latest reproduction of white supremacist ideology in America, now with an overtly authoritarian bent.

Kelley describes, however, how before Trump this was already in the works through 40 years of neoliberal globalization, attacks on the welfare state, public institutions and the poor, covert wars, political and cultural backlash against movements for racial and gender justice, rampant xenophobia, open misogyny, attacks on reproductive rights, and a backlash against multiculturalism and diversity.(19)

The air we breathe remains soaked in genocidal racial ideologies centuries in the making, but in the words of Lindqvist, “It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.” (172)

Although this article has constituted a largely historical investigation, present-day anti-fascist activists should take from this analysis the imperatives of vigilance and preparation to disrupt the reproduction in our own societies of racial and caste ideology, wherever we live, for it is a necessary building block of fascist movements everywhere.

Fortunately, previous generations of anti-racist struggle and the history of liberation movements have bequeathed to us examples, whether in the self-emancipation of the Maroons who forged new societies beyond the plantations; Haitian and French Revolutionaries who, for a time, worked together to merge the fight against aristocracy and slavery to overthrow one of the wealthiest colonies of its day; the enslaved Black workers of the U.S. South whose general strike broke the back of the Confederacy, or the anti-caste Dalit liberation movement of India.

Above all, an understanding of racial ideology as a material force, both intertwined with but distinct from class and gender social structures, is vital to striking fascism at its roots.

Notes

1. Wilkerson, Isabel. 2020. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. New York: Random House.
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2. See Whitman, James Q. 2017. Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
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3. Mason, Paul. 2021. How to Stop Fascism: History, Ideology, Resistance. London, Uk: Allen Lane.
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4. Paxton, Robert O. 2004. The Anatomy of Fascism. First Vintage books edition. New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
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5. For a concise terminological breakdown and discussion on the historical evolution of these terms see Lewis, Catherine, Philip R Cohen, Devyani Bahl, Elliot M Levine, and Waseem Khaliq. 2023. “Race and Ethnic Categories: A Brief Review of Global Terms and Nomenclature.” Cureus 15 (7): e41259 https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.41253.
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6. Fields, Barbara Jeanne. “Slavery, race and ideology in the United States of America.” New Left Review 181, no. 1 (1990): 95-118.
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7. French, Howard W. 2021. Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War. First edition. New York, N.Y.: Liveright Publishing Corporation. 66.
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8. https://www.facechangealliance.com/dumdiversas
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9. To further this point, in the same period of the Dum Diversas proclamation, the Portuguese were eager to make contact and ally with “Prester John,” a mythical African Christian monarch prominent in medieval European cultural imagination. Without apparent prejudice for his African ethnicity, the Portuguese plan was to enlist Prester John in their crusade against Muslims. It is now known that this myth was in reference to the Orthodox Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia, to which Portugal would establish formal diplomatic relations as friendly equals in the early 16th century. See Baldridge, Cates. 2012. Prisoners of Prester John: The Portuguese Mission to Ethiopia in Search of the Mythical King, 1520-1526. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co.
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10. Blackburn, Robin. 1997. “The Old World Background to European Colonial Slavery.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 65–102. https://doi.org/10.2307/2953313
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11. Goldenberg, David M. 2017. Black and Slave: The Origins and History of the Curse of Ham. Berlin: De Gruyter.
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12. Foner, Eric. 2014. Give Me Liberty!: An American History. Seagull fourth edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 106-8.
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13. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. 2008. “Reconstructing the Black Struggle.” International Socialist Review, no. 57 (May).
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14. Lindqvist, Sven. 1996. Exterminate All the Brutes. Translated by Joan Tate. New York: New Press: Distributed by W.W. Norton, 46.
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15. See the views of Spanish philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda during the Valladolid debate of 1550-1551.
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16. This is not to accuse today’s Royal Anthropological Institute of being a racist institution, but the extent to which Robert Knox’s influenced the development of anthropology in its foundational period remains a contested and debated topic within the discipline (see the English translation of “Dissecting the Races of Men: Robert Knox, Anatomy and Racial Theory in Britain, 1820-1870” in Prum, Michel, Groupe de recherche sur l’eugénisme et le racisme, Université Paris VII-Denis Diderot. 2011. Sexe, Race et Mixité Dans L’aire Anglophone. Paris: L’Harmattan).
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17. Césaire, Aimé, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Joan Pinkham. 2000. Discourse on Colonialism; A Poetics of Anticolonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press. 36.
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18. Hope, Jeanelle K., and Bill Mullen. 2024. The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition, Chicago, IL.: Haymarket Books.
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19. Robin D. G. Kelley, What is Racial Capitalism and Why Does It Matter? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–gim7W_jQQ;
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September-October 2025, ATC 238