Racism is actions, practices or beliefs, or social or political systems that consider different races to be ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities. It may also hold that members of different races should be treated differently. While most conceptualizations of racism include the notion of race based discrimination, the exact definition is controversial both because there is little scholarly agreement about the meaning of the concept race, and because there is also little agreement about what does and does not constitute discrimination. Some definitions consider that any assumption that a persons behavior would be influenced by their racial categorization is inherently racist, regardless of whether the action is intentionally harmful or pejorative, because stereotyping necessarily subordinates individual identity to group identity. In sociology and psychology, a common view distinguishes prejudice from racism, holding that racism is best understood as prejudice plus power because without the support of political or economic power, prejudice would not be able to manifest as a pervasive cultural, institutional or social phenomenon. In history, racism was a driving force behind the transatlantic slave trade, and behind states based on racial segregation such as the U.S. in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and South Africa under apartheid. Practices and ideologies of racism are universally condemned by the United Nations in the Declaration of Human Rights. It has also been a major part of the political and ideological underpinning of genocides such as The Holocaust, but also in colonial contexts such as the rubber booms in South America and the Congo, and in the European conquest of the Americas and colonization of Africa, Asia and Australia. Sharing the definition of Racism. Author Marcette Fochier
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 13:28:13 +0000
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