Racism

Racism refers to various belief systems maintaining that the essential value of an individual person can be determined according to a perceived or ascribed racial category and that social discrimination by race is therefore justifiable.

The word "racism" itself appeared in the 1930s, both in the English language and in French. Such racial prejudice usually includes the belief that people differ in aptitudes and abilities (such as intelligence, physical prowess, or virtue) according to race.

Most individuals who use the concept of racial categories believe that different races can be placed on a ranked, hierarchical scale. Racism may also be defined as the act of separating groups according to these ascribed race categories. In doing so the term receives the appropriate -ism ending, meaning the practice or act of doing such as described above.

By definition one who practices racism is known as a racist. Since racist became a pejorative term in developed nations during the last quarter of the twentieth century, the identification of a group or person as racist is nearly always controversial.

Definitions of racism

Racism is an ideological superstructure, and has been defined as the predication of decisions and policies on considerations of race for the purpose of subordinating a racial group and maintaining control over 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, Columbia University argued in "Slavery, Race and Ideaology in the United States of America", 'racism' is a 'historical phenomenon' ( p.100) 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.

Organizations and institutions that practice racism 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, but readily applies to any individual or group(s), regardless of social status or dominance.

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 instituitonal racism. Individual racism consists of overt acts by individuals, which can directly cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property. Instituitonal 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.

History of racism

A 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 ofRacial 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, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation and also discrimination on the grounds of nationality."

Etymology

The term "racism" appeared in the 1930s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It was considered distinct from the "theories of race," which had existed for at least 100 years before that. Pierre-André Taguieff (1987) 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 (NSDAP), 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 Barrès concerning the "French race".

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 (as opposed to simple xenophobia, which some might argue has existed in all places and times) 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, Sieyès, 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 relationshipto 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 (some authors have opposed a "close nationalism", based on racism, etc., towards an "open nationalism", based on the universalist conception of the nation, etc.), 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" (Nazism); 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 (1853-55) 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 (1951) 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 (a British citizen who naturalized himself as German because of his admiration for the "Aryan race"); Madison Grant, a renowned eugenicist, author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916)... 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 (for example, the Muslim Turks and the Catholic Austro-Hungarians).

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 (particularly when "other" is construed to mean "inferior"), 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" (Anglo-Americans) 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." (Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, p. 208)

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, Africa: Different but Equal, 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 (see Eric Wolf's Europe and the People without History).

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.

European colonialism

Authors such as Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, have pointed out how the racist ideology ("popular racism") developed at the end of the 19th century helped legitimize the imperialist conquests of foreign territories, and the crimes that accompanied it (such as the Herero and Namaqua Genocide, 1904-1907). 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 (1899) 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 (1899), 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.

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 atrocities committed by the German Nazis and the Japanese imperialists was without precedent.

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 (US, European countries such as France...).

Scientific racism

Scientific racism refers to the use of science (or the veneer 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 (1853-1855) 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 (against a trend of polygenism popular in anthropology at the time) 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 (though some did not). 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. To date, no peer reviewed scientific journal has disproved biological differences between ethnic or racial groups as a cause of intellectual disparity.

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 (Marianne Bertrand) and Harvard University (Sendhil Mullainathan) 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.

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 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 (cleanliness of blood) ostracized New Christians (offspring of Sephardic Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism) 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 (cleared at the Second Vatican Council in 1965), 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, published by the Tsar's secret police, a key element of anti-Semitic thought has been that Jews influence or control the world.

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 (reverse) 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 (which has a history of institutional racism by the majority, including slavery).

Reverse racism has also be used to describe discrimination by 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 (sometimes called positive discrimination outside the U.S.) 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.

Racial discrimination as an official government policy

Racial discrimination is and has been official government policy in several countries. Nazi Germany's state racism is the most famous example, along with South Africa during the apartheid era. In the 1970s, Uganda expelled tens of thousands of ethnic Indians . Until 2003, Malaysia enforced discriminatory policies limiting access to university education for ethnic Chinese and Indian students who are citizens by birth of Malaysia, and many other policies explicitly favoring bumiputras (Malays) remain in force .

In the United States, racial profiling of minorities by law enforcement officials is a controversial subject. Law enforcement looks for people who "fit the profile" to commit a crime according to experience and statistics. Some people consider this to be a form of racism. Some claim that profiling young Arab male fliers at airports will only lead to increased recruitment of older, non-Arab, and female terrorists, as well as Arab males who might be mistaken for white males. Some also state that this is unnecessary, as it brings the mistrust of many people. Many critics of racial profiling claim that it is an unconstitutional practice because it amounts to questioning individuals on the basis of what crimes they might commit or could possibly commit, instead of what crimes they have actually committed. Thus, it shifts the emphasis from the act itself (the crime) to the person (the "criminal"); Michel Foucault argued in Discipline and Punish (1975) that this was a general tendency of "disciplinary societies", creating the psychological category of "delinquent".

Racist groups

• Aryan Nations - a group of militant white supremacists
• Black Hebrew Israelites - A group of Black Israelites that deems Jews to be evil.SPLC
• Mansions of Rastafari (Bobo Ashanti)-An offshoot of the Rastafari movement that considers whites to be inherently evil. Guardian
• British National Party - a far-right political party in the UK.Britain's "The Telegraph"
• Christian Identity - A radical offshoot of British Israelism that deems "Aryans" to be the chosen people and that the Jewish community is "false Jews" born of "barbarians" or Satan.Cesnur,SPLC, etc.
• The Creativity Movement - formerly known as "The World Church of the Creator", a religion founded by Ben Klassen which bills itself as "A White Racial Religion" and advocates "Racial Holy War" CNN and self-described.
• Nation of Islam - A radical Islamic sect started in America by blacks, which holds as dogma that whites are evil. Founded by Wallace Fard Muhammad and led by Louis Farrakhan who advocates anti-white and anti-semitic positions.
• Front National - a political party in France whose leader proposed deporting 3 million non-Europeans from France in his 1995 presidential election bid. The Economist
• Imperium europa - A far-right party in the small nation of Malta that gained some attention for its leader being sued for inciting racial hatred. Times of Malta See Norman Lowell
• Jewish Defense League & Kahane Chai- Kahanist fringe organizations accused of violence against Arabs and others. Kahanism is the ideology named after Meir Kahane. (Israeli Supreme Court, see their article)
• Ku Klux Klan - a group of American white supremacists, founded after the American Civil War. Spartacus, ADL, etc.
• The Nation of Gods and Earths - A more radical offshoot of the Nation of Islam whose methods aren't fully sanctioned by the original group.
• National Alliance - White separatist group founded by William Pierce, a former member of George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party.(ADL and self-described)
• National Socialist Japanese Workers and Welfare Party - Japanese variant of Nazism. (self described)
• Neo-Nazism(self described)
• New Black Panther Party - an anti-white, anti-Catholic, anti-semitic organization not sanctioned by the living members of the original Black Panther Party(SPLC)
• New Zealand National Front - a group in New Zealand which describes itself as "nationalist" but which has been called "neo-nazi".Stuff.co.nz
• Patriotic Youth League - Australian group linked to Neo-Nazism, Sydney Morning Herald
• Posse Comitatus (U.S. movement) - Many adhere to Anti-Semitic and related ideals.SPLC
• Racist Skinheads - self described
• Stormfront.org - White Nationalist discussion forum. Accused of racism.
• Westboro Baptist Church - Topeka, Kansas based group.
• White Aryan Resistance -
• White Australia Movement - a whites-only immigration movement in Australia. Now largely extinct.
• Vigrid -- A Norwegian organisation that appeals to youths. Conveying a message of neo-Nazism, poorly hidden behind a veil of Norse mythology.