Racism

While several definitions of racism exist, critical race scholars have challenged, and continue to challenge, the common tendency to conflate racism with prejudice (i.e., negative individual [Page 1344]attitudes or beliefs) by addressing the intersecting components of historical-contemporary social processes—including how these bear upon and inhere in institutionalized or systemic oppression—and the material and immaterial realities derived from White privilege and power. Drawing on such features, racism, then, is an integrated system of advantage and disadvantage that engages with and accents racial categories—and the meanings imputed to racial categories—to perpetuate the privileged position of the dominant group through individual as well as social, cultural, and institutional practices. Racial ideologies, that is, the socially constructed ideas of a racial group, including the myth of White superiority, are ...