Racism

The Changing Nature of Racism

As Michael Omi and Howard Winant observed, the nature of racism varies according to historical and social context. Consequently, it is useful to outline how both racism and scholarly thinking about racism evolved over time. Most observers agree that the use of race-like categories for differential treatment stretches far back into history; however, the use of such categories was by no means widespread or consistent. Perhaps the most significant development in the history of racism was the late 18th-century emergence of a more systematic racist ideology. Often termed classical racism, this perspective held that (a) the human race could be divided into biologically distinct subspecies; (b) members of each race inherited shared physical, intellectual, cultural, and moral traits; and (c) races could be rated as “superior” or “inferior” in terms of these inherited traits. Accompanying the rise of classical racism was a flurry of “scientific” activity (later discredited) that purported to prove the superiority of Northern Europeans and the inferiority of other races. Socially, theories of racial superiority were used to legitimize European colonization and the dispossession of native peoples, the practice of slavery in the Americas, and other forms of domination such as racial segregation and exclusion. In Europe, classical racism reached its peak with the Aryan racial superiority theories of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, which provided the justification for the genocidal murder of millions of European Jews during the Holocaust.

Countering classical racism in the mid-20th century were emerging scientific attacks against its basic claims, most notably by anthropologists such as Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Ashley Montagu. Benedict is often credited with the first use of the term racism in her 1943 critique of classical racism. Subsequent events, including post-World War II decolonization and the civil rights movement in the United States, and additional work by scientists led to the further decline of classical racism, to the extent that its present support is generally limited to a few scholars and marginalized groups of white supremacists.

Given changes in society and in the nature of race relations, scholars have attempted to describe the changing nature of racism. Beginning in the 1950s, much of the attention of mainstream social science focused on racism as individual prejudice and discrimination. This in turn led to social-psychological research that attempted to understand the roots of prejudice. One significant development in the 1960s was the emergence of a distinction, first proposed by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, between individual and institutional racism. In contrast to individual racism, institutional racism is the cumulative and unequal effects of institutional policies and practices in such areas as housing, education, health care, politics, employment, and the environment. This is evident in unequal rates of treatment for disease, approval of mortgage loans, graduation, arrest, prosecution, and sentencing and in exposure to environmental hazards. Subsequent work distinguished between direct institutional racism, such as the system of segregation in the U.S. South prior to the 1960s, and indirect forms, such as a system of public school attendance and funding that, in concert with other social forces, creates a significant number of public schools that are highly segregated and unequally funded. One final distinction often made is the difference between overt and covert racism, the former being unequal treatment that is obvious and blatant, the latter being discrimination that may be invisible to the victim (e.g., telling a prospective tenant that a vacant apartment has already been rented because the landlord does not want to rent to individuals from certain racial groups).

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