James Whitman | |
---|---|
Occupation(s) | Professor, writer |
Relatives | Martin J. Whitman (father) Barbara Whitman (sister) |
Awards | Guggenheim Fellow |
Academic background | |
Education | Yale University (BA, JD) Columbia University (MA) University of Chicago (PhD) |
Thesis | Rule of Roman Law in Romantic Germany, 1790–1860 (1987) |
Doctoral advisor | Arnaldo Momigliano |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Law |
Sub-discipline | Comparative Law,Comparative Legal History |
Institutions | Stanford University,Yale University |
Main interests | Legal history |
James Q. Whitman is an American lawyer and Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale University. [1]
Whitman is the son of investor and philanthropist Martin J. Whitman. [2] He also has a sister,Tony Award-winning producer Barbara Whitman. [2] [3]
He graduated from Yale University with a BA in 1980 and a JD in 1988,from Columbia University with a MA in 1982,and from the University of Chicago with a PhD in 1987. He was a Guggenheim Fellow. [4] [5] In 2015,he was awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the Catholic University of Leuven
Whitman's 2017 book,Hitler's American Model:The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law,received wide coverage in the news and academia. [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] Whitman demonstrates the extent to which US racial laws (Jim Crow laws,separate but equal legal doctrine) influenced the Nazi Regime in formulating the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935. The leading Nazi student of US racial laws was Heinrich Krieger,a jurist who studied at the University of Arkansas School of Law in 1933–34. There,he researched how laws across the US segregated and disenfranchised Native Americans,African Americans,and other disfavored groups like including Asians,Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. Krieger wrote the memorandum relied upon at the meeting June 1934 in which the Nazi racial laws,known as the Nuremberg Laws,were hashed out. Just as the Jim Crow Laws prohibited and criminalized intermarriage between Whites and Blacks,though as his book points out these types of laws existed in 30 states,many outside of the Jim Crow south. So the Nuremberg Laws prohibited marriages with Jews and threatened punishment. The Nazis departed little from their US model except insofar as that they found it too severe. [11] The so-called one-drop rule,classified as non-white anyone with even a single ″Negro″ancestor. This was disturbing even to National Socialist policymaker,who shuddered at the ‘human hardness’it entailed. According to the Nuremberg Race Laws,a ″full Jew″was only someone who had three or four Jewish grandparents;there were also –in National Socialist terminology –″half Jews″and ″quarter Jews″,but they were not affected by the same discrimination.
In 2017,he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AASS). [12]
Racism is discrimination and prejudice against people based on their race or ethnicity. Racism can be present in social actions, practices, or political systems that support the expression of prejudice or aversion in discriminatory practices. The ideology underlying racist practices often assumes that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups that are different in their social behavior and innate capacities and that can be ranked as inferior or superior. Racist ideology can become manifest in many aspects of social life. Associated social actions may include nativism, xenophobia, otherness, segregation, hierarchical ranking, supremacism, and related social phenomena. Racism refers to violation of racial equality based on equal opportunities or based on equality of outcomes for different races or ethnicities, also called substantive equality.
Racial segregation is the separation of people into racial or other ethnic groups in daily life. Segregation can involve the spatial separation of the races, and mandatory use of different institutions, such as schools and hospitals by people of different races. Specifically, it may be applied to activities such as eating in restaurants, drinking from water fountains, using public toilets, attending schools, going to films, riding buses, renting or purchasing homes or renting hotel rooms. In addition, segregation often allows close contact between members of different racial or ethnic groups in hierarchical situations, such as allowing a person of one race to work as a servant for a member of another race. Racial segregation has generally been outlawed worldwide.
White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to those of other races and thus should dominate them. The belief favors the maintenance and defense of any power and privilege held by white people. White supremacy has roots in the now-discredited doctrine of scientific racism and was a key justification for European colonialism.
Karl Roland Freisler was a German jurist, judge and politician who served as the State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice from 1934 to 1942 and as President of the People's Court from 1942 to 1945. As a prominent ideologist of Nazism, he influenced as a jurist the Nazification of Germany's legal system. He attended the 1942 Wannsee Conference, the event which set the Holocaust in motion. He was appointed President of the People's Court in 1942, overseeing the prosecution of political crimes as a judge, and became known for his aggressive personality, his humiliation of defendants, and frequent use of the death penalty in sentencing.
The Aryan race is an obsolete historical race concept that emerged in the late-19th century to describe people who descend from the Proto-Indo-Europeans as a racial grouping. The terminology derives from the historical usage of Aryan, used by modern Indo-Iranians as an epithet of "noble". Anthropological, historical, and archaeological evidence does not support the validity of this concept.
Julius Streicher was a member of the Nazi Party, the Gauleiter of Franconia and a member of the Reichstag, the national legislature. He was the founder and publisher of the virulently antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer, which became a central element of the Nazi propaganda machine. The publishing firm was financially very successful and made Streicher a multi-millionaire.
The master race is a pseudoscientific concept in Nazi ideology in which the putative "Aryan race" is deemed the pinnacle of human racial hierarchy. Members were referred to as "Herrenmenschen".
The racial policy of Nazi Germany was a set of policies and laws implemented in Nazi Germany under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, based on pseudoscientific and racist doctrines asserting the superiority of the putative "Aryan race", which claimed scientific legitimacy. This was combined with a eugenics program that aimed for "racial hygiene" by compulsory sterilization and extermination of those who they saw as Untermenschen ("sub-humans"), which culminated in the Holocaust.
Eugen Fischer was a German professor of medicine, anthropology, and eugenics, and a member of the Nazi Party. He served as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, and also served as rector of the Frederick William University of Berlin.
Nordicism is an ideology which views the historical race concept of the "Nordic race" as an endangered and superior racial group. Some notable and influential Nordicist works include Madison Grant's book The Passing of the Great Race (1916); Arthur de Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853); the various writings of Lothrop Stoddard; Houston Stewart Chamberlain's The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899); and, to a lesser extent, William Z. Ripley’s The Races of Europe (1899). The ideology became popular in the late-19th and 20th centuries in Germanic-speaking Europe, Northwestern Europe, Central Europe, and Northern Europe, as well as in North America and Australia.
Racism has been reflected in discriminatory laws, practices, and actions against "racial" or ethnic groups throughout the history of the United States. Since the early colonial era, White Americans have generally enjoyed legally or socially sanctioned privileges and rights which have been denied to members of various ethnic or minority groups at various times. European Americans have enjoyed advantages in matters of education, immigration, voting rights, citizenship, land acquisition, and criminal procedure.
The "Manifesto of Race", otherwise referred to as the Charter of Race or the Racial Manifesto, was an Italian manifesto promulgated by the government of Benito Mussolini on 14 July 1938. Its promulgation was followed by the enactment, in October 1938, of the Racial Laws in Fascist Italy and the Italian Empire.
The Nuremberg Laws were antisemitic and racist laws that were enacted in Nazi Germany on 15 September 1935, at a special meeting of the Reichstag convened during the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party. The two laws were the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans and the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households; and the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens. The remainder were classed as state subjects without any citizenship rights. A supplementary decree outlining the definition of who was Jewish was passed on 14 November, and the Reich Citizenship Law officially came into force on that date. The laws were expanded on 26 November 1935 to include Romani and Black people. This supplementary decree defined Romani people as "enemies of the race-based state", the same category as Jews.
Honorary Aryan was a semi-official category and expression used in Nazi Germany to justify the exceptional awarding of Aryan certificates to some regime-favoured Mischlinge who according to Nuremberg Laws standards would not have been recognized as belonging to the Aryan race, but whom German officials nevertheless chose to spare persecution.
The Nazi Party of Germany adopted and developed several pseudoscientific racial classifications as part of its ideology (Nazism) in order to justify the genocide of groups of people which it deemed racially inferior. The Nazis considered the putative "Aryan race" a superior "master race", and they considered Jews, mixed-race people, Slavs, Romani, Africans, and certain other ethnicities racially inferior "sub-humans", whose members were only suitable for slave labor and extermination. These beliefs stemmed from a mixture of historical race concepts, 19th-century anthropology, scientific racism, and anti-Semitism, especially racial anti-Semitism. The term "Aryan" generally originated during the discourses about the use of the term Volk.
The social policies of eugenics in Nazi Germany were composed of various ideas about genetics. The racial ideology of Nazism placed the biological improvement of the German people by selective breeding of "Nordic" or "Aryan" traits at its center. These policies were used to justify the involuntary sterilization and mass-murder of those deemed "undesirable".
Racial antisemitism is prejudice against Jews based on a belief or assertion that Jews constitute a distinct race that has inherent traits or characteristics that appear in some way abhorrent or inherently inferior or otherwise different from the traits or characteristics of the rest of a society. The abhorrence may find expression in the form of discrimination, stereotypes or caricatures. Racial antisemitism may present Jews, as a group, as a threat in some way to the values or safety of a society. Racial antisemitism can seem deeper-rooted than religious antisemitism, because for religious antisemites conversion of Jews remains an option and once converted the "Jew" is gone. In the context of racial antisemitism Jews cannot get rid of their Jewishness.
This is a list of topics related to racism:
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that enforced racial segregation, "Jim Crow" being a pejorative term for an African American. Such laws remained in force until 1965. Formal and informal segregation policies were present in other areas of the United States as well, even as several states outside the South had banned discrimination in public accommodations and voting. Southern laws were enacted by white-dominated state legislatures (Redeemers) to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by African Americans during the Reconstruction era. Such continuing racial segregation was also supported by the successful Lily-white movement.
Nazism, formally National Socialism, is the far-right totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During Hitler's rise to power in 1930s Europe, it was frequently referred to as Hitlerism. The later related term "neo-Nazism" is applied to other far-right groups with similar ideas which formed after the Second World War when the Third Reich collapsed.
November 2017 Issue