Antedating of "Racism"

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Thu Feb 28 02:23:19 UTC 2013


On Feb 27, 2013, at 9:14 PM, Shapiro, Fred wrote:

> This is a remarkable antedating of "racism," posted by Evan Kirshenbaum on alt.usage.english.  Jesse, do you monitor alt.usage.english and send relevant information to the OED, or is there too much there to wade through?
>
> The current OED first use (1926 citation) was contributed by me.
>
>
> racism (OED 1926)
>
> 1902 _Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian 1902_ (1903) 134 (Google Books)   Col. R. H. PRATT. - ... Segregating any class or race of people apart from the rest of the people kills the progress of the segregated people or makes their growth very slow.  Association of races and classes is necessary in order to destroy racism and classism.
>
I thought it might an antedating for classism too, but I see (to my surprise) there's a "class-ism", with hyphen, from 1842:

1842   S. Bamford Passages Life Radical II. xviii. 89   The same really contemptible feeling of class-ism, the curse of England and Englishmen, and of women also.

LH

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