re: #230 The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge

re: #226 Barefoot Grin

Adam Serwer’s Atlantic article today is really eye-opening. I knew that the US immigration and race politics was in some ways an inspiration for Nazis and later South Africa, but I didn’t realize the extent. ‘America the incubator’ is still valid.

theatlantic.com

Nazi eugenics was inspired by the American movement and laws passed in various states. Don’t know if he mentioned that—haven’t read the article yet.

A good piece, but I think Serwer condenses the concept a bit: Myself, I think the case is more that “White Supremacy”, then as now, is more of a pan-national/supra-national movement: that the high-minded intellectualization of racism (and its introduction into countries’ immigration/citizenship legal systems) which began in the late 19th Century wasn’t so much a matter of one country “inspiring” another, but of all the racially-based enactments stemming from a single pool of sources: each nation adopting whatever principles they thought would fly with the (white) citizenry.