The curious beginningsof a useless word
by Sam Francis, 1999
The Oxford English Dictionary is a multivolumereference work that is one of Western scholarship’s most remarkable achievements — thestandard dictionary of the English language on what are known as “historicalprinciples”. Unlike most dictionaries, the OED also provides informationon the first historical appearance and usage of words. The range of theerudition in the OED is often astounding, but for AR readers, one of itsmost interesting entries is for the word “racism”.
According to the second edition (1989) of the OED, the earliest knownusage of the word “racism” in English occurred in a 1936 book by the American”fascist”, Lawrence Dennis, The Coming American Fascism. The secondusage of the term in English that the OED records is in the title of abook originally written in German in 1933 and 1934 but translated intoEnglish and first published in 1938 — Racism by Magnus Hirschfeld,translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. Since Hirschfeld died in 1935, beforethe publication of Dennis’ book the following year, and had already usedthe word extensively in the text and title of his own book, it seems onlyfair to recognize him rather than Dennis as the originator of the word”racism”. In the case of the word “racist” as an adjective, the OED ascribesthe first known usage to Hirschfeld himself. Who was Magnus Hirschfeldand what did he have to tell us about “racism”?
Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) was a German-Jewish medical scientistwhose major work was in the field of what came to be known as “sexology” — thescientific study of sex. Like Havelock Ellis in England and Alfred Kinseyin the United States, Hirschfeld was not only among the first to collectsystematic information about sexuality but also was an apostle of sexual”liberation”. His major work was a study of homosexuality, but he alsopublished many other books, monographs, and articles dealing with sex.He wrote a five-volume treatise on “sexology” as well as some 150 otherworks and helped write and produce five films on the subject.
It is fair to say that his works were intended to send a message–thattraditional Christian and bourgeois sexual morality was repressive, irrational,and hypocritical, and that emancipation would be a major step forward.His admiring translators, Eden and Cedar Paul, in their introduction toRacism,write of his “unwearying championship of the cause of persons who, becausetheir sexual hormonic functioning is of an unusual type, are persecutedby their more fortunate fellow-mortals.” Long before the “sexual revolution”of the 1960s, Magnus Hirschfeld was crusading for the “normalization” ofhomosexuality and other abnormal sexual behavior.
There is speculation that Leon Trotsky may have invented the word “racist.”