Racism repositions its targets from repentable sinners to unregenerable vermin

Evidence

Only in its modern, ‘scientific’, racist form, the age-long repellence of the Jews has been articulated as an exercise in sanitation; only with the modern reincarnation of Jew-hatred have the Jews been charged with an ineradicable vice, with an immanent flaw which cannot be separated from its carriers. Before that, the Jews were sinners; like all sinners, they were bound to suffer for their sins, in an earthly or other-worldly purgatory – to repent and, possibly, to earn redemption. Their suffering was to be seen so that the consequences of sin and the need for repentance are seen. No such benefit can possibly be derived from watching vice, even if complete with its punishment. (If in doubt, consult Mary Whitehouse.) Cancer, vermin or weed cannot repent. They have not sinned, they just lived according to their nature. There is nothing to punish them for. By the nature of their evil, they have to be exterminated. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 209

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes the premodern sinner paradigm (punishable, redeemable) from the modern racist paradigm (vice as immanent, incurable, requiring extermination rather than punishment — a core conceptual building block.
• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s distinction quoted at [208] and to the sin-vs-vice formulation; also anticipates later Islamophobia readings where the target group is dehumanized as unassimilable. — connects to: Anti-Muslim and antisemitic persecution became racism when conversion was deemed biologically impossible. — Nasar Meer, Tariq Modood, Refutations of Racism in the ‘Muslim…, 49; Racism locates identity beyond will so conversion yields loss not change — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 179; Racism’s strategy is estrangement via expulsion or extermination, interchangeably — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 190 (+6 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The shift from punishable sin to unpunishable vermin is the hinge that makes extermination thinkable; dense, paradigm-level claim about how racialization forecloses redemption.

Related

• Racism locates identity beyond will so conversion yields loss not change (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Racism functions as practices that ascribe and legitimate social positions #expands (0.85)
• Racism exists as a variable spectrum, not a single invariant form #expands (0.85)
• Slavery, lynching, and segregation each institutionalized a distinct form of racism #exemplifies (0.82) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 59
• Anti-Blackness and Islamophobia assign deviance through parallel racializing logics #exemplifies (0.80) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1119
• Ideologically rationalized bigotry historically recurs against successive target groups #exemplifies (0.78) — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia, 30
• Race-thinking preceded and differs from racism as a full ideology #qualifies (0.75)