ABSTRACT

Before the twentieth century, debates about slavery, segregation and racial inequality in the United States were often bound up with the meanings of racial ‘prejudice’. In this article, Alexander suggests that the concept was often double-edged: deployed both against racial inequality and oppression, but also to maintain it. Since the end of the eighteenth century, abolitionists and other advocates of racial equality charged that their opponents were possessed by irrational prejudice that they sought to stamp out through a variety of means. In another line of argument, however, racial prejudice was natural or, at least, so deeply rooted from centuries of slavery as to be basically ineradicable. This meant that attempts to abolish slavery and establish an egalitarian, multiracial society were forever doomed to failure. Some people drew the lesson from this conception of prejudice that it might be best to remove Blacks from American soil altogether by colonizing them elsewhere, particularly in West Africa. Abolitionists, however, did not accept the idea that racial prejudice was indestructible and thought it could be removed through greater education. After the Civil War, with the end of slavery, defenders of segregation drew on similar arguments, suggesting that, if there were prejudices between the races, these resulted from the wisdom of the ages and should be respected, even as supporters of racial equality sought to show that these prejudices need not be permanent. Alexander’s article therefore explores the complex and sometimes counter-intuitive uses of the concept of racial ‘prejudice’ from the late eighteenth century up until the subsequent development of the Jim Crow segregation regime in the late nineteenth century.

摘要

二十世纪之前，美国关于奴隶制、种族隔离和种族不平等的争论往往与种族“偏见”的含义联系在一起。在这篇文章中，亚历山大认为这个概念通常是双刃剑：既反对种族不平等和压迫，又维护它。自 18 世纪末以来，废奴主义者和其他种族平等倡导者指责他们的反对者被非理性偏见所占据，他们试图通过各种手段消除这种偏见。然而，在另一个论点中，种族偏见是自然的，或者至少，深深植根于几个世纪的奴隶制，以至于基本上无法根除。这意味着废除奴隶制和建立平等、多种族社会的企图永远注定要失败。有些人从这种偏见观念中吸取了教训，即最好通过在其他地方，特别是在西非殖民，将黑人从美国土地上彻底清除。然而，废奴主义者不接受种族偏见是坚不可摧的观点，并认为可以通过更多的教育来消除它。内战结束后，随着奴隶制的结束，种族隔离的捍卫者提出了类似的论点，认为如果种族之间存在偏见，这些偏见源于时代的智慧，应该受到尊重，即使种族平等的支持者也在寻求表明这些偏见不一定是永久性的。