RACE MADNESS

A 1934 essay by Italian anarchist Camillo Berneri (1897-1937) exploring the contentious issue of eugenics, race and racial prejudice in pre-war Europe and the United States, the so-called advanced nations. In Austria in October 1933, the courts granted a divorce in a marriage contracted between an Aryan and a Jewess, in a verdict in which the grounds cited include incompatibility deriving from race difference between the spouses, a difference that ought “in a symbiosis as close as marriage, inevitably trigger profound frictions.” In Lithuania the National Socialist Party there called for a ban on marriages between Jews and non-Jews. In France a blatantly racist and anti-semitic Celtic League was launched while in the United States of America there were laws banning marriages between blacks and whites, there are universities closed to black students and anthropologists who talk of an American race (not to mention lynching!). And, in Italy, the Italian nationalist press included La Razza, La Stirpe, Il Grido della Stirpe, etc...