Professor draws parallels between Nazis and Jim Crow

History really came alive for Natalye Pass Harpin in college, where she saw herself reflected in the stories and events they were learning about in class, and where she was also learning about other groups of people. It was in that environment where history wasn’t just about what happened in the past, but its relationship to the present.

“I wanted to be able to create that environment for others, so that they could feel more connected to it,” says Harpin, a continuing lecturer at UC San Diego, where she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history. She’s also an associate professor at Grossmont College. “Also … to be able to connect it to the things that are happening today and how many of these communities are still affected by the legacies of the histories that we’re learning about.”

She’s heard people describe history as “boring,” but she wants to make it accessible and meaningful. Part of that effort will be in her upcoming lecture at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Central Library in downtown San Diego, “Afro-descendants in Nazi Germany.” To close out Black History Month, Harpin will share the history of the Nazi’s racial policies toward Black Germans during the 1930s and ’40s, and how they were inspired by the racism of America’s Jim Crow-era South. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For a longer version of this conversation, visit sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-lisa-deaderickstaff.html.)

Q:

From what I’ve read, Black people in Germany were already dealing with anti-black racism in Germany, so what was different once Adolf Hitler was leading the country?

A:

There was a lot more push to forcibly sterilize, for example. So, because these people were non-aryans [by Nazi ideology] — there were terms like “mischling kinder” (mixed children) or “Rheinlandbastarde” (Rhineland bastard) — and were considered to be a result of colonization within continental Africa, a lot of them were forcibly sterilized because [the Nazis] didn’t want them to be able to have their own children who would be German citizens because of where they were born, sort of like in the United States. If you’re born here, on the soil, generally, you’re regarded as an American citizen.

There was also the delegitimization of a lot of these people’s relationships, so they weren’t allowed to be in public spaces with their non-black partners anymore. It sort of became a Jim Crow situation, like in the U.S. The Nazis borrowed a lot from the Jim Crow South and applied it to their populations of non-aryans in Germany, so that included people who weren’t Black. [There were rules like] not being able to go to parks or other public spaces on certain days and only having a certain time where you could go to those places if you wanted to. A lot of anti-blackness had already been a thing, but now there was more of an incentivized push to encourage people to do that type of anti-black violence, even with adults doing it to children just to prove that they were part of the Aryan group, part of the Nazis.

Q: What is the legacy of these racist policies for Black people in Germany, and in Europe, today?

A: That, I’m not familiar with. I mentioned that Germany had pulled a lot of the similar barriers that were in practice, de facto and de jure, in the Jim Crow South. The Nazis thought that the Jim Crow system took things too far, like the one-drop rule, for example. [The one-drop rule is the idea that any kind of Black ancestry — one drop — makes a person racially Black.] The Nazis thought that the one-drop rule was too far because they also recognized that a lot of people had technically been mixed in at some point; but the Nazis were really in awe of the fact that the United States maintained this innocence and this whole public image around the world as being a place of liberty and freedom, but never having anyone sort of confront that, ‘How are you the country of freedom and liberty when you’re restricting people and what they can and can’t do, where they can and can’t eat, and these are your own citizens?’ So, the Nazis thought that it was too far to try and implement everything, but they liked the fact that the United States sort of got away with having a sterling reputation of freedom and liberty on its public face, but behind the scenes were really practicing a lot of the same ideologies among the marginalized communities here. [The Nazis] didn’t organically come up with that themselves, they pulled a lot of that from the Southern states’ de jure segregation laws.

Q: The Nazis were known for destroying documents connected to concentration camps and their sterilization programs, making it very difficult to retrace the experiences of the victims of their regime. Currently, we continue to be confronted with things like the rejection of African American studies in schools, or the banning of books and discussions of the racism and bigotry in American history. As a historian, what happens when societies are successful in altering and erasing history in this way? What is the danger here?

A: As a historian, I would say the danger is that we open ourselves up to having to repeat it because I find that when people don’t know the things that actually happened, they can’t analyze how they may be participating in the early stages of it, modern day. When you don’t learn about the things that have happened to other people, even today, you can’t understand why their descendants are still upset. So, it’s very easy to say things like, ‘Well, you know, everyone has freedom. That’s what they fought for in the 1960s.’ But, if you don’t know that redlining continued, that sundown towns continued, into the 1970s in California, you’re not going to really think about, ‘Why are there no Black people who live in this neighborhood?’ Or, ‘Why is everyone homogenized in these pockets of San Diego?’ All of this is by design, so when you ban those perspectives and histories, it makes people potentially doomed to repeat it because they don’t know what happened and how to stop it from happening again. It makes it so that they can’t understand different perspectives, or what different families are going through currently, as a legacy of those time periods.

Natalye Pass Harpin