Encyclopedia
Racism is a belief in the moral or biological superiority of one race or ethnic group over another or others. The term racism is also sometimes used to refer to preference for one's own ethnic group , fear of difference , views or preferences against interbreeding of the races , and
nationalism, regardless of any explicit belief in superiority or inferiority fact. Related concepts include prejudice, discrimination and racialism.
Racism has been used to justify discrimination | social discrimination, racial segregation and violence, including genocide.
The term racist, when used to describe someone who subscribes to racism, has been a pejorative term since at least the 1940s, and for this reason the identification of a group or person as racist is nearly always controversial.
Definitions of racism
Racism is an ideology: When racism, a belief, is applied in practice it takes the form of prejudice and segregation by the predication of decisions and policies on considerations of race for the purpose of subordinating a racial group, maintaining control over that group, or excluding that group. Racism can more narrowly refer to a
system of oppression, such as institutional racism, that is based on the concept of social discrimination by race.
Historian Barbara Field argued in "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America" that 'racism' is a 'historical phenomenon' which does not explain racial ideology. She suggests that investigators should consider the term to be an
American rhetorical device with a historical explanation and not be an explanation in itself. She suggests that using race as a word with real meaning is a common error akin to
superstition. Other scholars, however, say that races do exist and the concept has signifigant meaning.
Organizations and institutions that put racism into action discriminate against, and marginalize, a class of people who share a common racial designation. The term "racism" is usually applied to the dominant group in a society, because it is that group which has the means to oppress others. However this readily applies to any individual or group, regardless of social status or dominance. The latter is sometimes mistakenly referred to as "reverse racism", however this term is often used with the assumption that the term racism is a one way street and can only be applied to the dominant group in society.
Racism can be both overt and covert. There are two, closely related, forms of racism: individuals acting against other individuals, and acts by a total community against another community. These are called individual and institutional racism. Individual racism consists of overt acts by individuals, which can directly cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property. Institutional racism is more covert and subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts, but no less destructive. It often originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus frequently receives far less public condemnation than the first type.
W.E.B. DuBois argued that
racialism is the belief that differences between the races exist, be they biological, social,
psychological, or in the realm of the soul. He then went on to argue that racism is using this belief to push forward the argument that one's particular race is superior to the others.
Etymology
The term
racism is of comparatively recent origin; it first appeared in the
1930s, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary. However, Merriam-Webster cites its origins in 1860s France as
racisme. Racism was considered distinct from the “theories of race”, which had existed for at least 100 years before that. Pierre-André Taguieff shows that
racism and
racist appeared in the French Larousse Dictionary in 1932, with
racist being defined as “the name given to the German
national-socialists, designating, rather than the sole
Nazi Party , the whole of the
völkisch movement”. The word
racist is also occasionally used in Edouard Drumont's
anti-Semitic La Libre Parole or by [Maurice Barrčs] concerning the “French race”.
Environment, Culture and Genetics
The debate about
nature versus nurture is often central to the discussion of racism. On one side it is argued that generalizations about a race or group are due to factors other than the genetic features of that race, such as environment, culture, poverty, discrimination, etc. On the other side are those who say that these generalized behaviors and attributes are at least partly due to genetics.
From the 19th to early 20th centuries, the prevalent view was that genetics played a primary role in behavior. Following World War II, a liberal revolution in the academic fields promoted the view that behaviors are entirely due to environmental factors. Recently, scientific studies, especially involving
twins, have challenged those views and it is now generally accepted that most behaviors have both genetic and environmental causes. However, this is only widely accepted as regards individuals and families, and is still very controversial when applied to ethnicities or races.
History of racism
See: Racism by countryA number of international treaties have sought to end racism. The
United Nations uses the definition of
racial discrimination laid out in the
International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and adopted in 1966:
- ...any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life..
In 2000, the European Union banned racism along with many other forms of social discrimination: "Article 21 of the charter prohibits discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, color, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, disability, age or sexual orientation and also discrimination on the grounds of nationality."
Origins of contemporary racism
The medieval discourse of "race struggle"
Although anti-Semitism has a long European history, racism itself is frequently described as a "modern" phenomenon. In the view of the French intellectual
Michel Foucault, the first formulation of racism emerged in the
Middle Ages as the "discourse of race struggle", a historical and political discourse which Foucault opposed to the philosophical and juridical discourse of sovereignty. According to Foucault, this first appearance of racism as a theoretical discourse may be found during the 1688
Glorious Revolution in
Great Britain, in
Edward Coke or
John Lilburne's work.
However, this "discourse of race struggle", as interpreted by Foucault, must be distinguished from 19th century biological racism, also known as race science or
scientific racism. Indeed, this medieval discourse has many points of difference with modern racism. First of all, in this "discourse of race struggle", "race" is not considered a biological notion — which would divide
humanity into biological groups — but as a
historical notion. Moreover, this discourse is opposed to the sovereign's discourse: it is used by the bourgeoisie, the people and the aristocracy as a mean of struggle against the monarchy. This discourse, which first appeared in Great Britain, was then carried on in France by people such as Boulainvilliers, Nicolas Fréret, and then, during the
French Revolution, Sieyčs, and afterward Augustin Thierry and
Cournot. Boulainvilliers, which created the matrix of such racist discourse in medieval France, conceived the "race" as something closer to the sense of "nation", that is, in his times, "
people". Hence, he conceived France as divided between various nations — the unified
nation-state is, of course, here an anachronism — which themselves formed different "races". Boulainvilliers opposed the
absolute monarchy, who tried to bypass the aristocracy by establishing a direct relationship to the Third Estate. Thus, he created this theory of the French aristocrats as being the descendants of foreign invaders, whom he called the "
Franks", while the Third Estate constituted according to him the autochthonous, vanquished
Gallo-Romans, who were dominated by the Frankish aristocracy as a consequence of the right of conquest. Henceforth, medieval racism was opposed to
nationalism and the nation-state: the comte de Montlosier, in exile during the French Revolution, who borrowed Boulainvilliers' discourse on the "Nordic race" as being the French aristocracy that invaded the plebeian "Gauls", thus showed his despise for the Third Estate calling it "this new people born of slaves...
mixture of all races and of all times". While 19th century racism is related to nationalism , medieval racism precisely divides the nation into various non-biological "races", which are the consequences of historical conquests and social conflicts.
19th century transformation of the medieval discourse
Michel Foucault thus traces the genealogy of modern racism to this medieval "historical and political discourse of race struggle". According to him, it divided itself in the 19th century according to two rival lines: on one hand, it was incorporated by racists, biologists and
eugenicists, who gave it the modern sense of "race" and, even more, transformed this popular discourse into a "state racism" ; on the other hand,
Marxists also seized this discourse, transforming the essentialist notion of "race" into the historical notion of "class struggle", defined by socially structured position: capitalist or proletarian.
Thus, biological racism was invented in the 19th century.
Arthur de Gobineau's
An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races may be considered as one of the first theorizations of this new racism, founded on an essentialist notion of race, and which would progressively tie itself to nationalism and to the state, creating this new form of nationalism which appeared in the
New Imperialism period and, in France, in the midst of the
Dreyfus Affair. Hannah Arendt has shown in
The Origins of Totalitarianism the emergence of "continental
imperialisms", i.e. pan-Germanism and
pan-Slavism, both racist ideologies which would play a decisive role after the 1919
Treaty of Versailles. Other famous authors include Edouard Drumont, an anti-Semitic French author; Vacher de Lapouge's "anthroposociology"; Herder, who applied race to nationalist theory to develop militant ethnic nationalism;
H.S. Chamberlain at the end of the 19th century ;
Madison Grant, a renowned
eugenicist, author of
The Passing of the Great Race was an influential book of scientific racism [i] ...
... Such authors posited the historical existence of national races such as German and French, branching from basal races supposed to have existed for millennia, such as the
Aryan race, and believed political boundaries should mirror these supposed racial ones.
Ethnic conflicts
Debates over the origins of racism often suffer from a lack of clarity over the term. Many use the term "racism" to refer to more general phenomena, such as xenophobia and ethnocentrism, although scholars attempt to clearly distinguish those phenomena from racism as an ideology or from
scientific racism, which has little to do with ordinary xenophobia.
Others conflate recent forms of racism with earlier forms of ethnic and national conflict. In most cases, ethno-national conflict seems to owe to conflict over land and strategic resources. In some cases ethnicity and
nationalism were harnessed to rally combatants in wars between great religious empires .
Notions of race and racism often have played central roles in such ethnic conflicts. Historically, when an adversary is identified as "other" based on notions of race or ethnicity , the means employed by the self-presumed "superior" party to appropriate territory, human chattel, or material wealth often have been more ruthless, more brutal, and less constrained by moral or ethical considerations.
One example of the brutalizing and dehumanizing effects of racism was the attempt to
deliberately infect Native Americans with smallpox during
Pontiac's Rebellion in 1763, itself a war intended to ethnically cleanse the "other" from Native American land.
According to historian Daniel Richter, Pontiac's Rebellion saw the emergence on both sides of the conflict of "the novel idea that all Native people were 'Indians,' that all Euro-Americans were 'Whites,' and that all on one side must unite to destroy the other."
In the Western world, racism evolved, twinned with the doctrine of white supremacy, and helped fuel the
European exploration, conquest, and colonization of much of the rest of the world -- especially after
Christopher Columbus reached the Americas. Basil Davidson insists in his documentary,
, that racism, in fact, only just recently surfaced—as late as the 1800’s, due to the need for a justification of slavery in the Americas. The idea of slavery as an "equal-opportunity employer" was denounced with the introduction of Christian theory in the West.
Maintaining that Africans were "subhuman" was the only loophole in the then accepted law that "men are created equal" that would allow for the sustenance of the
Triangular Trade. New peoples in the Americas, possible slaves, were encountered, fought, and ultimately subdued, but then due to western diseases, their population decreased innumerably. Through both influences, theories about "race" developed, and these helped many to justify the differences in position and treatment of people whom they categorized as belonging to different races .
Some people like Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda have argued during the Valladolid controversy in the middle of the 16th century, that the
Native Americans were natural slaves because they had no "souls". In Asia, the Chinese and Japanese Empires were both strong colonial powers, with the Chinese making colonies and vassal states of much of East Asia throughout history, and the Japanese doing the same in the 19th-20th centuries. In both cases, the Asian imperial powers believed they were ethnically and racially superior to their vassals, and entitled to be their masters. Excluding Indians as they were facing problems with the British.
European colonialism
Authors such as Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 book
The Origins of Totalitarianism, have pointed out how the racist ideology developed at the end of the 19th century helped legitimize the
imperialist conquests of foreign territories, and the crimes that accompanied it . Auguste Comte's positivist ideology of necessary social progress as a consequence of scientific progress lead many Europeans to believe in the inherent superiority of the "White Race" over non-whites.
Rudyard Kipling's poem on
The White Man's Burden is a poem by the British poet Rudyard Kipling [i]. ...
is one of the most famous illustrations of such belief. Racist ideology thus helped legitimize subjugation, slavery and the dismantling of the traditional societies of indigenous peoples, which were thus conceived as humanitarian obligations as a result of these racist rationalizations. Other colonialists recognized the depravity of their actions but persisted for personal gain and there are some Europeans during the time period who objected to the injustices caused by colonialism and lobbied on behalf of aboriginal peoples. Thus, when the so-called "
Hottentot Venus" was displayed in England in the beginning of the 19th century, the African Association publicly opposed itself to this shameful exhibition. The same year that Kipling published his poem,
Joseph Conrad published
Heart of Darkness is a novella [i] by Joseph Conrad [i]. ...
, a clear criticism of the
Congo Free State owned by
Leopold II of Belgium.
Human zoos were an important means of bolstering "popular racism" by connecting it to
scientific racism: they were both objects of public curiosity and of
anthropology and
anthropometry . Joice Heth, an African-American slave, was displayed by
P.T. Barnum in 1836, a few years after the exhibition of
Saartjie Baartman, the "Hottentot Venus", in England. Such exhibitions became common in the New Imperialism period, and remained so until
World War II. Congolese pygmy
Ota Benga was displayed in 1906 by
eugenicist Madison Grant, head of the
Bronx Zoo, as an attempt to illustrate the "missing link" between humans and orangutans: thus, racism was tied to
Darwinism, creating a
social Darwinism ideology which tried to ground itself in
Darwin's scientific discoveries. The 1931 Paris
Colonial Exhibition displayed
Kanaks from
New Caledonia . A "Congolese village" was on display as late as 1958 at the
Brussels' World Fair.
Slavery in the United States
Contention over the morality and legality of the institution of slavery was one of the cardinal issues which led to the American Civil War. The failed attempt at secession by the Southern United States led to the Emancipation Proclamation, which was the official end of legal slavery in the United States.
Emancipated blacks in the United States still had to struggle against institutional racism, forced segregation, violation of voting rights, and even terrorism. The
Ku Klux Klan is perhaps the most notorious of these organizations espousing racist ideologies and enforcing discriminatory cultural norms with murderous violence and the threat of murderous violence.
Anti-Native American racism
The Native Americans have faced racism in the United States since the days of
Colonial America. The Native Americans were massacred by US forces in the 1800's which some claim was genocide . US President Andrew Jackson was quoted as saying that" the only good Indian is a dead Indian" .Native Americans continue to face struggles. The Shoshone nation has accused the US government of racism for testing nuclear weapons close to their tribal lands. .
.
Nazism, and Japanese imperialism
The Nazi, and Nazi resembling regimes which rose to power in Europe and Japan before World War II advocated and implemented policies and attitudes which were racist, xenophobic, and often genocidal. While racism, xenophobia, and genocide were not new, the scope of the acts committed by the German Nazis and the Japanese governments was larger than other examples.
Anti-Japanese-American and Anti-Italian-American Racism during WWII
During the second world war, over 100,000 Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians were forcibly placed in concentration camps where they remained until the end of hostilities with Japan .
The incident that triggered the surge of anti-Japanese racism was the Imperial navy's attack on Pearl Harbor similar to how the events of 9/11 triggered a backlash against Arabs, Iranians and Muslims. Racism differs from country to country.
Tens of thousands of Italian-Americans were put in internment camps during WWII as well. Thousands more were placed under surveillence or had their property repossessed by the government.
Joe DiMaggio's father, who lived in San Francisco, had his boat and house confiscated. One official stated that if it had not been for Joe DiMaggio's status as a baseball player, his father would most likely had been sent to an internment camp.
Anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism is a specific case of racism targeting the
Jews, although scholars argue whether it should be considered a
sui generis specie or not. Massive violent attacks against Jews have been recorded since at least the 12th century and eventually become known as
pogroms is a form of riot [i] directed against a particular group, whether ethnic, religious or other...
after the events in the
Russian Empire, where official segregation of the
Russian Jews in the
Pale of Settlement since the early 1800s was compounded by oppressive legislation such as the 1882 May Laws.
In the Middle Ages
Iberian peninsula, the system of limpieza de sangre ostracized New Christians from the rest of society. In
Portugal, the legal distinction between New and Old Christians was ended in 1772.
Scholars distinguish traditional,
religious anti-Semitism, which derives from
Christian accusation of the deicide , with 19th-20th centuries
racial anti-Semitism, which ultimately led to
the Holocaust in which about 6 million European Jews, 1.5 million of them children, were systematically murdered.
The rise of views of the Jews as a malevolent "race" generated anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that the Jews, as a group, were plotting to control or otherwise influence the world. From the early infamous Russian literary
hoax,
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a text published in the Russian Empire [i] in the early 20th century [i] ...
, published by the Tsar's secret police, a key element of anti-Semitic thought has been that Jews influence or control the world.
Anti-Arab and Anti-Middle Eastern Racism
There are reports of a large increase in anti-Arab/anti-Iranian racism in the
United States since the September 11 2001 attacks. Racial profiling of people with a
Middle Eastern ethnic background was proposed by a
New York Congressman on 2006-08-15. In movies and jokes, Arabs and Iranians have been shown as being terrorists and barbarians or as inferior people. . Iraq and Iran were demonized by the US government and this led to hatred towards Arabs and Iranians living in the Untited States
There have been attacks against Arabs and Iranians not only on the basis of their religion but more importantly on their ethnicity because numerous Christian Arabs and Iranians also been racially attacked.This includes the burning of a Arab Christian Church in Los Altos,California after September 11th which was owned by local Palestinian Christian congregation.
Quebec bashing
It has been argued that
Quebec bashing, especially in English Canada, is a form of racism, though this is disputable, since Quebecois identity is a civic/territorial, rather than ethnic/race based identity.
Types of racism
Racism may be expressed individually and consciously, through explicit thoughts, feelings, or acts, or socially and unconsciously, through institutions that promote inequalities among "races", as in institutional racism. The concept of "Hate speech" has been created in order to prosecute discriminative discourse, which may be penalized in various countries .
Scientific racism
Scientific racism refers to the use of science to justify and support racist beliefs. The use of science to justify racist beliefs goes back at least to the early 18th century, though it gained most of its influence in the mid-19th century. Works like
Arthur Gobineau's
An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races attempted to frame racism within the terms of biological difference among human beings, and with the rise of theories of
evolution after the work of
Charles Darwin became well-known, it became common to consider some races more evolved than others. These points of view were very common within the scientific community at the time—even Darwin, who was an active
abolitionist and considered all humans to be of the same species believed that there were inherent biological differences in the mental capacities of different races. Ideologies such as
social Darwinism and
eugenics used and reinforced many of these views.
There were also scientists who argued against biological reenforcement of racism, even if they believed that biological races did exist . In the sciences of anthropology and biology, though, these were minority positions until the mid-20th century. During the rise of
Nazism in Germany, many scientists in Western nations worked to de-bunk the racial theory on which the regime rested its claims of superiority. This, combined with repulsion to
Nazi eugenics and the racial motivations behind
the Holocaust, lead to a re-orientation of opinion around scientific research into race in the years following
World War II. Changes within scientific disciplines—such as the rise of
Boasian school of anthropology in the United States—also contributed to this shift. Since then, many of the scientific studies which claimed to support racist claims have since been methodologically debunked by scientists with specifically anti-racist agendas, such as
Stephen J. Gould.
The status of the concept of biological race remains very controversial within science, though practically no mainstream scientists admit to using scientific data to justify racist beliefs. Some scientists, such as
Arthur Jensen and
Richard Lynn, have argued that the threat of being labeled as a "scientific racist" has made the scientific study of race and racial differences politically taboo and has stifled true scientific discourse. Many scientists, though, believe that there is no evidence for typological notions of biological race, nor scientific justifications for racist beliefs.
Individual, structural, and ideological racism
Racism may be divided in three major subcategories: individual racism, structural racism, and ideological racism.
Examples of individual racism include an employer not hiring a person, failing to promote or giving harsher duties or imposing harsher working conditions, or firing, someone, in whole or in part due to his race.
Researchers at the
University of Chicago and
Harvard University found in a 2003 study that there was widespread discrimination in the workplace against job applicants whose names were merely perceived as "sounding black." These applicants were 50% less likely than candidates perceived as having "white-sounding names" to receive callbacks for interviews, no matter their level of previous experience. Results were stronger for higher quality résumés. The researchers view these results as strong evidence of unconscious biases rooted in the country's long history of discrimination. This is an example of structural racism, because it shows a widespread established belief system. Another example is apartheid in
South Africa, and the system of
Jim Crow laws in the
United States of America. Another source is lending inequities of banks, and so-called redlining.
Reverse racism
Reverse racism is a controversial term used to describe attitudes, behaviors, and policies which are racially discriminatory in a manner which is contrary to a historical pattern of racial discrimination. Usually a historically sociopolitically nondominant race is perceived to benefit at the expense of a historically sociopolitically dominant race.
Reverse racism is typically used to describe discrimination by a minority race. An alleged example is supremacism and separatism by a minority race against the majority in the
United States .
Reverse racism has also been used to describe discrimination against a majority race.
South Africa is an example of a nation in which an economically, militarily, and culturally powerful minority has historically discriminated against a powerless and disenfranchised majority. Reverse racism in South Africa is understood to mean discrimination by the majority race against the minority.
Affirmative action is a government policy or a program of giving preferences to members of particular social groups, including races. Opponents contend that such preferential treatment by the government is a form of institutionalized reverse racism which unfairly discriminates against individuals by racial category. Proponents contend that such preferential treatment promotes
racial integration and economic equality of groups which have been affected by racism.
Many opponents of reverse racism claim that use of the term itself is pejorative, racist and no more legitimate than any other form of racism. Some believe the term to be used almost exclusively against their racial group, implying that only members of their race are capable of being racists. Many opponents of the concept say exactly this, that racism is by definition exclusively of the race in power.
Groups alleged to be guility of reverse racism are included in the
Racist Groups section below.
Crypto-Racism
Elmar Holenstein uses the term
crypto-racism as a synonym what he calls "hidden racism"., while blogger Josh Marshall uses it in contrast to "closet racism" .
Racism as official government policy
Sometimes official government policy includes racial discrimination.
Nazi Germany's state racism is the most famous example, along with
South Africa during the apartheid era. Examples of racism in
United States domestic policy include
slavery and the genocide against
Native Americans. The practice of racist
Jim Crow laws by Southern states was common until the
1964 Civil Rights Act gave the Federal government more enforcement power. During
World War II, people of
Japanese ancestry who was living on the
west coast of the U.S. was imprisoned in
internment camps. Other examples of racism in U.S. domestic policy included human experimentation without consent, the most famous case being the
Tuskegee Syphilis Study in which Black males were infected with syphyllis and purposefully not treated in order to study the long-term effects of the disease.
Uganda has been accused of expelling tens of thousands of ethnic
Indians in the 1970s. Until 2003,
Malaysia enforced discriminatory policies limiting access to university education for ethnic
Chinese and Indian students who were citizens of Malaysia by birth, and many other policies explicitly favoring
bumiputras remain in force.
Some critics, including
Gore Vidal, British MP
George Galloway and
Ward Churchill, have suggested that
British and United States foreign policy in the
Middle East is racist. George Galloway has also claimed that Arabs in the
Guantanamo Bay detainment camp, Iraqis in the
Abu Ghraib prison and other jails, and civilians in
Iraq, are not being treated as human beings by the United States.
Racial profiling of minorities by
law enforcement officials is consider by some people to be a form of racism. Some claim that profiling young Arab males at airports will only lead to increased recruitment by terrorists of old non-Arab females, as well as Arab males who can "pass" as a non-Arab. Some state that this profiling is unnecessary, as it brings about the mistrust of many people. Some critics claim that racial profiling of citizens in the United States is an unconstitutional practice because the government is infringing upon an individual's freedom just on the basis of what a racial group is believed to be more likely to do . French philosopher
Michel Foucault argued in
Discipline and Punish is a book written by the philosopher Michel Foucault [i]....
that such profiling shifts the emphasis from the act itself to the person , and that a general tendency of "disciplinary societies" is to create the psychological category of "delinquent".
Based on the Mandal commission report submitted during 1980, the
Indian Government decided to reserve 27% more seats to students from Backwards classes and bring the total reservation percentage up to 50%. Subsequent surveys conducted by the government indicate that economical and educational level of backward classes is comparable to people from upper castes. Certain
Indian
states, such as
Tamil Nadu, reserve around 70% of the total seats to students belonging to certain castes..In recent years,so called upper castes are able to secure only 2.3 percentage of total seats in professional education as against their population of 15%..A person born in a backward caste is eligible for reservation irrespective of their economical or social status. Many politicians, film stars, and rich industrialists also reap reservation benefits.. Accusations have been made that the Indian parliament, dominated by people from backward classes has amended. the constitution whenever a court judgement was not in favour of reservation decisions
Allegedly racist groups
