Racism

Racism is a set of beliefs, practices, and social structures that treats groups of human beings socially defined by unalterable, often physical, attributes (races) as inherently unequal. Racism is a form of subordination and exclusion. It is a part of the power structure of institutions and social relations. Racism is sustained by coercion and consent, and it is expressed in prejudice, discrimination, oppression, violence, or, in some extreme cases, genocide. This broader perspective on racism, epitomized in the work of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963), is dominant in political science, sociology, and social anthropology.

In social and political psychology, the term is used more narrowly to describe a set of beliefs or attitudes. William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) took such an approach, identifying racism as a specific form of ethnocentrism related to the perception of ingroup/outgroup relations. Racism is a set of prejudices that enables and legitimates exploitation and scapegoating based on the “over-generalization” that the different capacities and characteristics of a human being are determined by his or her belonging to a group. This standpoint is often associated with the work of Gordon Allport (1897–1967).

In everyday life, the term racism is often used loosely with respect to subordination or hostility toward a group.

From a historical perspective, racism is considered as a modern phenomenon. Besides the discussion on the existence of “proto-racism” in ancient Greek or Rome, the emergence of modern racism is connected to the Enlightenment and the appearance of scientific theories of the evolution of humankind. The search for the biological foundation of human behavior led to essentialist interpretations of the differences between groups of human beings, although the analytical distinction between biology and culture was increasingly used: One of the characteristics of racism is that the cultural characteristics and potentials of groups are seen as basically determined by biological differences.

Politically, racism is associated with conquest, colonialism, enslavement, and genocide. With the emergence of nationalism, racism became part of the social construction of national homogeneity. The emphasis on the cultural uniqueness of a nation-state led to certain types of culturally based exclusionary ideologies—for example, in romantic nationalism, often associated with the ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). The democratic revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic led to the first attempts at emancipation of Blacks from slavery and Jews from the ghettos. Contrary to those efforts at emancipation, racism as a system of beliefs became further elaborated, as exemplified in the work of Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882). He combines the idea of there being essential differences between human “races” with the legitimization of the political subordination of one group to another and the idea that “race mixing” contributes to the decline of humankind.

At the turn of the 20th century, scientific racism became an accepted part of academia, associated [Page 2198]with new sciences such as eugenics (Francis Galton, 1822–1911) and the development of intelligence tests. Especially, newly developed statistical methods were used to “prove scientifically” the worth of different races. At the same time, racist political regimes stabilized, such as the institutionalized system of racism embodied in the “Jim Crow” laws of the U.S. South. The cruel climax of such racist political regimes was Nazi Germany, with its legally implemented idea of “race purity” (Nuremberg Laws of 1935; German: Nürnberger Gesetze) and the attempt to exterminate an entire part of the German population.

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