Comparative Racial Regimes: Jim Crow in the United States, Apartheid in South Africa, and the German Nazi Regime

This panel explores similarities and differences in the development and undoing of racial regimes in distinct settings. Scholars will examine the ideological connections, structural similarities, and direct points of contact between the racialized social hierarchies of Jim Crow United States, Nazi Germany, and apartheid-era South Africa. Speakers will examine direct influences between nations, more general parallels, and clear distinctions.
Future programs will shed light on how actors in these different countries learned from each other and from other international movements in developing tools of resistance to these racist regimes. We will also develop programs that focus on contemporary pedagogical approaches for teaching the histories of these regimes (individually and in relation to each other) in classroom settings as well as in public history venues such as museums and historical sites.
Welcome & Introduction:
Timothy Snyder (Levin Professor of History at Yale, Faculty Advisor Fortunoff Archive)
Three Racial Regimes of the 20th Century: the Universal in the Particular
Moderator:
Daniel Magaziner (Professor of History, Yale University)
Panelists:
- William Sturkey (Associate Professor of History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
- Thuto Thipe (Lecturer, University of Cape Town)
- Patricia Heberer Rice (Senior Historian, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Discussion and Closing Remarks:
David Blight (Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center and Sterling Professor of History at Yale)
Sponsored by: Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center, Yale University
With generous support from the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund