Skip to main content

Thought threatening posts were off limits?

Posted 12 December 2008 07:21 AM Hide Post
This is a good example right here. People complain about African Americans use this and that or planning the race card but you got stupid people with very little intelligence starting a post like this people like you keep racism going all you had to say ways that your calling in White and I bet none of the response would have change just another example of people hiding behind there computer. Me on the other would sure like to meet some of my "wonderful" timesdaily forum people face to face. Comment on your own race and leave other alone. There are other reason to call in work what about being a jack@$% who ran into someone that put their foot in you..
Original Post

Replies sorted oldest to newest

I never said I would do anything I said I would like to meet some of them face to face doesn't mean I was think negative and I never said I would put my foot in anyone but someone else who was offended by people comments might and don't go posting rules making racist comments is against the rule also.
quote:
Originally posted by vick13:
Thought threatening posts were off limits?

Posted 12 December 2008 07:21 AM Hide Post
This is a good example right here. People complain about African Americans use this and that or planning the race card but you got stupid people with very little intelligence starting a post like this people like you keep racism going all you had to say ways that your calling in White and I bet none of the response would have change just another example of people hiding behind there computer. Me on the other would sure like to meet some of my "wonderful" timesdaily forum people face to face. Comment on your own race and leave other alone. There are other reason to call in work what about being a jack@$% who ran into someone that put their foot in you..
quote:
Originally posted by something2say:
This is a good example right here. People complaining about African Americans use this and that or playing the race card but you got stupid people with very little intelligence starting a post like this, people like you keep racism going all you had to say was that your calling in White and I bet none of the response would have change just another example of people hiding behind there computer. Me on the other would sure like to meet some of my "wonderful" timesdaily forum people face to face. Comment on your own race and leave other alone. There are other reason to call in work what about being a jack@$% who ran into someone that put their foot in you...you fill in the blanks but I would "never" do anything like that. LOL


EH, I disagree with Vick13. I don't see this post as threatening anyone.
Actually, "I would like to meet some of my forum WONDERFUL friends face to face" is where the threat lies for me...not the foot in the backside comment...I agree with Vick -- that is a threat when you read it in the context of the rest of his posts...BTW most of us on here say things that we WOULD say to your face and aren't hiding behind anything...if you ever met us without the threats you would see that we are as real in the real world as we are on this forum.
If anyone got offended than my fault I just get tired of coming on here reading topics and before the days end it has something to do with race if the topic (the one that upset me) was about gays calling into work than that's what it should have been about not starting a topic about "Negro's" calling into work was that in the news no it wasn't and 9 times out of 10 if its something racist or racial base it always about a "Negro". So I apologize if anyone thought that was a threat like I told EH I read worse.
quote:
If anyone got offended than my fault I just get tired of coming on here reading topics and before the days end it has something to do with race if the topic (the one that upset me) was about gays calling into work than that's what it should have been about not starting a topic about "Negro's" calling into work was that in the news no it wasn't and 9 times out of 10 if its something racist or racial base it always about a "Negro". So I apologize if anyone thought that was a threat like I told EH I read worse.




There wre OTHER RACES mentioned too. It strikes me as YOU being racist for trying to single out NEGRO when there were other races included.
I was just stating the obvious get a life flashlight cop I expect that from you I read some of you out-landish post. Believe me when I came up and even now I don't even think about race I only notice it when its brought up like " do you know such and such..the Mexican that works for the courthouse " other that conversations like that and on here I never ever even think about race.
quote:
I was just stating the obvious get a life flashlight cop I expect that from you I read some of you out-landish post. Believe me when I came up and even now I don't even think about race I only notice it when its brought up like " do you know such and such..the Mexican that works for the courthouse " other that conversations like that and on here I never ever even think about race.




UMMMM!!! shame on you!!! you being racist against the Mexicans now?


just using a little of your logic. Wink
quote:
Originally posted by 33rd:
"Mexican" isn't an ethnicity either. Keep trying.


I posted the LINK.

"the term "racial discrimination" shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, 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."

Please try to understand a post before commenting.
Or...do you need it like this?

"[Collapse] 11 million articles
150,000 volunteers
Free Knowledge Forever Donate Now » Learn More...
[Expand] Support Wikipedia: a non-profit project. Donate Now »
[Expand] Support Wikipedia: a non-profit project. — Donate Now
Racism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Part of a series of articles on
Discrimination
General forms
Ageism · Biphobia · Heterophobia · Homophobia · Racism · Sexism
· Speciesism · Religious intolerance
Reverse discrimination · Xenophobia

Specific forms
[show]Social
Ableism · Adultism
Anti-homelessness · Classism
Elitism · Ephebiphobia · Gerontophobia
Heightism · Heterosexism ·
Homosexism · Lesbophobia ·
Lookism · Mentalism ·
Misandry · Misogyny ·
Pediaphobia · Sizeism · Transphobia

[show]Against ethnic groups
American · Arab · Armenian
Blacks · Canadian · Catalan
Chinese · English · European · French
German · Igbo · Indian · Iranian · Irish
Italian · Japanese · Jewish · Korean
Malay · Mexican · Native Americans
Polish · Portuguese · Quebec · Roma
Romanian · Russian · Scottish
Serbian · Spanish · Turkish · Whites

[show]Against beliefs
Atheism · Bahá'í · Catholicism
Christianity · Hinduism · Judaism
Mormonism · Islam · Neopaganism
Protestantism
New religious movements


Manifestations
Slavery · Racial profiling · Lynching
Hate speech · Hate crime
Genocide (examples) · Ethnocide · Gendercide
Ethnic cleansing · Pogrom · Race war
Religious persecution · Blood libel
Paternalism · Police brutality

Movements
[show]Discriminatory
Aryanism · California Proposition 8 • Hate groups · Ku Klux Klan
Neo-Nazism · American Nazi Party
South African National Party
Supremacism

[show]Anti-discriminatory
Autistic rights · Abolitionism
Children's rights · Civil rights · Consumer/Survivor/Ex-Patient Movement · Disability rights (Inclusion)
Father's rights · Feminism · LGBT rights
Masculism · Men's rights · Mother's rights
Women's rights · Women's / Universal suffrage · Youth rights


Policies
Discriminatory
Racial/Religious/Sex segregation
Apartheid · Group rights · Redlining
Internment · Ethnocracy
Numerus clausus · Ghetto benches Affirmative action

Anti-discriminatory
Emancipation · Civil rights
Desegregation · Integration
Equal opportunity · Gender equality

Counter-discriminatory
Affirmative action · Group rights
Racial quota · Reservation (India)
Reparation · Forced busing
Employment equity (Canada)
Black Economic Empowerment (BEE)

Law
Discriminatory
Anti-miscegenation · Anti-immigration
Alien and Sedition Acts · Jim Crow laws
Test Act · Apartheid laws
Ketuanan Melayu · Nuremberg Laws
Diyya · Anti-homelessness legislation

Anti-discriminatory
Anti-discrimination acts ·
Anti-discrimination law ·
14th Amendment · Crime of apartheid

Other forms
Afrocentrism · Adultcentrism · Androcentrism · Anthropocentrism ·
Colorism · Cronyism · Ethnocentrism ·
Economic · Genism · Gynocentrism
Linguicism · Nepotism · Triumphalism

Related topics
American exceptionalism · Asian fetish
Bigotry · Black supremacy
Diversity · Eugenics · Eurocentrism
Multiculturalism · Oppression
Political correctness · Prejudice
Stereotype · Tolerance and intolerance

Discrimination portal

This box: view • talk • edit

A series of articles on
Race Main topics
Race
Race and genetics
Human genetic variation
Historical definitions
Race and health
Race and intelligence
Social
Social interpretations of race
Racism
Racial segregation
Anti-miscegenation laws
Racialism
Racial profiling
Race in the United States
Race in Brazil
Related
Ethnic group
Human evolution
Genetics
Racism topics
Category: Race
This box: view • talk • edit

Racism, by its simplest definition, is the belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. People with racist beliefs might hate certain groups of people according to their racial groups. In the case of institutional racism, certain racial groups may be denied rights or benefits, or get preferential treatment. Racial discrimination typically points out taxonomic differences between different groups of people, even though anybody can be racialised, independently of their somatic differences. According to the United Nations conventions, there is no distinction between the term racial discrimination and ethnic discrimination.

Contents [hide]
1 Definitions
1.1 Legal
1.2 Sociological
2 Racial discrimination
2.1 Institutional
2.2 Economic
2.3 Declarations against racial discrimination
3 Ideology
3.1 Ethnic nationalism
4 Ethnic conflicts
5 Academic variants
5.1 Scientific variants
5.1.1 Heredity and eugenics
5.1.2 Polygenism and racial typologies
5.1.3 Human Zoos
6 Evolutionary theories about the origins of racism
7 As state-sponsored activity
8 In history
8.1 In the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance
8.2 As part of colonialism in the 19th century
8.3 In the Age of Enlightenment
9 Interminority variants
10 Anti-White racism
11 See also
12 Further reading
13 References & notes
14 External links



Definitions
Though the term racism usually denotes race-based prejudice, violence, discrimination, or oppression, the term can also have varying and hotly contested definitions. Racialism is a related term, sometimes intended to avoid these negative meanings. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, racism is a belief or ideology that all members of each racial group possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially to distinguish it as being either superior or inferior to another racial group or racial groups. The Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines racism as a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular racial group, and that it is also the prejudice based on such a belief. The Macquarie Dictionary defines racism as: "the belief that human races have distinctive characteristics which determine their respective cultures, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule or dominate others."


Legal
The UN does not define "racism", however it does define "racial discrimination": according to the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination,

the term "racial discrimination" shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, 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. '[1]

This definition does not make any difference between prosecutions based on ethnicity and race, in part because the distinction between the two remains debatable among anthropologists.[2] According to British law, racial group means "any group of people who are defined by reference to their race, colour, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origin".[3]


Sociological
Some sociologists have defined racism as a system of group privilege. In Portraits of White Racism David Wellman (1993) has defined racism as "culturally sanctioned beliefs, which, regardless of intentions involved, defend the advantages whites have because of the subordinated position of racial minorities,” (Wellman 1993: x). Sociologists Noel Cazenave and Darlene Alvarez Maddern define racism as “...a highly organized system of 'race'-based group privilege that operates at every level of society and is held together by a sophisticated ideology of color/'race' supremacy. Racist systems include, but cannot be reduced to, racial bigotry,” (Cazenave and Maddern 1999: 42). Sociologist and former American Sociological Association president Joe Feagin argues that the United States can be characterized as a "total racist society" because racism is used to organize every social institution (Feagin 2000, p. 16).

More recently, Feagin has articulated a comprehensive theory of racial oppression in the U.S. in his book Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression (Routledge, 2006). Feagin examines how major institutions have been built upon racial oppression which was not an accident of history, but was created intentionally by white Americans. In Feagin's view, white Americans labored hard to create a system of racial oppression in the 17th century and have worked diligently to maintain the system ever since. While Feagin acknowledges that changes have occurred in this racist system over the centuries, he contends that key and fundamental elements have been reproduced over nearly four centuries, and that U.S. institutions today reflect the racialized hierarchy created in the 17th century. Today, as in the past, racial oppression is not just a surface-level feature of this society, but rather pervades, permeates, and interconnects all major social groups, networks, and institutions across the society. Feagin's definition stands in sharp contrast to psychological definitions that assume racism is an "attitude" or an irrational form of bigotry that exists apart from the organization of social structure.


Racial discrimination

An anti-discrimination poster in a Hong Kong subway station, January 2005Racial discrimination is treating people differently through a process of social division into categories not necessarily related to race. Racial segregation policies may officialize it, but it is also often exerted without being legalized. Researchers, including Dean Karlan and Marianne Bertrand, at the MIT and the University of Chicago 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. The researchers view these results as strong evidence of unconscious biases rooted in the United States' long history of discrimination (i.e. Jim Crow laws, etc.)[4]


Institutional
Further information: Institutional racism, State racism, Affirmative action, Racial profiling, and Racism by country
Institutional racism (also known as structural racism, state racism or systemic racism) is racial discrimination by governments, corporations, educational institutions or other large organizations with the power to influence the lives of many individuals. Stokely Carmichael is credited for coining the phrase institutional racism in the late 1960s. He defined the term as "the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin".[5]

Maulana Karenga argued that racism constituted the destruction of culture, language, religion and human possibility, and that the effects of racism were "the morally monstrous destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples."[6]

Economic
Historical economic or social disparity is alleged to be a form of discrimination which is caused by past racism and historical reasons, affecting the present generation through deficits in the formal education and kinds of preparation in the parents' generation, and, through primarily unconscious racist attitudes and actions on members of the general population. (e.g. A member of race Y, Mary, has her opportunities adversely affected (directly and/or indirectly) by the mistreatment of her ancestors of race Y.) The common hypothesis embraced by classical economists is that competition in a capitalist economy decreases the impact of discrimination. The thinking behind the hypothesis is that discrimination imposes a cost on the employer, and thus a profit-driven employer will avoid racist hiring policies.


Declarations against racial discrimination
Racial discrimination contradicts the 1776 United States Declaration of Independence, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen issued during the French Revolution and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed after World War II, which all postulate equality between all human beings.

In 1950, UNESCO suggested in The Race Question —a statement signed by 21 scholars such as Ashley Montagu, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gunnar Myrdal, Julian Huxley, etc. — to "drop the term race altogether and instead speak of ethnic groups". The statement condemned scientific racism theories which had played a role in the Holocaust. It aimed both at debunking scientific racist theories, by popularizing modern knowledge concerning "the race question," and morally condemned racism as contrary to the philosophy of the Enlightenment and its assumption of equal rights for all. Along with Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), The Race Question influenced the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court desegregation decision in "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka".[7]

The United Nations uses the definition of racial discrimination laid out in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, 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.(Part 1 of Article 1 of the U.N. International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination)[8]

In 2001, the European Union explicitly banned racism along with many other forms of social discrimination in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, the legal effect of which, if any, would necessarily be limited to Institutions of the European Union: "Article 21 of the charter prohibits discrimination on any ground such as race, color, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, disability, age or sexual orientation and also discrimination on the grounds of nationality."[9]


Ideology

A racist political campaign poster from the 1866 Pennsylvania gubernatorial electionAs an ideology, racism existed during the 19th century as "scientific racism", which attempted to provide a racial classification of humanity.[10] Although such racist ideologies have been widely discredited after World War II and the Holocaust, the phenomena of racism and of racial discrimination have remained widespread all over the world.

It was already noted by DuBois that in making the difference between races, it is not race that we think about, but culture: “…a common history, common laws and religion, similar habits of thought and a conscious striving together for certain ideals of life”[11] Late nineteenth century nationalists were the first to embrace contemporary discourses on "race", ethnicity and "survival of the fittest" to shape new nationalist doctrines. Ultimately, race came to represent not only the most important traits of the human body, but was also regarded as decisively shaping the character and personality of the nation.[12] According to this view, culture is the physical manifestation created by ethnic groupings, as such fully determined by racial characteristics. Culture and race became considered intertwined and dependent upon each other, sometimes even to the extent of including nationality or language to the set of definition. Pureness of race tended to be related to rather superficial characteristics that were easily addressed and advertised, such as blondness. Racial qualities tended to be related to nationality and language rather than the actual geographic distribution of racial characteristics. In the case of Nordicism, the denomination "Germanic" became virtually equivalent to superiority of race.

Bolstered by some nationalist and ethnocentric values and achievements of choice, this concept of racial superiority evolved to distinguish from other cultures, that were considered inferior or impure. This emphasis on culture corresponds to the modern mainstream definition of racism: "Racism does not originate from the existence of ‘races’. It creates them through a process of social division into categories: anybody can be racialised, independently of their somatic, cultural, religious differences."[13] This definition explicitly ignores the fiery polemic on the biological concept of race, still subject to scientific debate. In the words of David C. Rowe "A racial concept, although sometimes in the guise of another name, will remain in use in biology and in other fields because scientists, as well as lay persons, are fascinated by human diversity, some of which is captured by race."[14]

Until recent history this racist abuse of physical anthropology has been politically exploited. Apart from being unscientific, racial prejudice became subject to international legislation. For instance, the Declaration on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on November 20, 1963, address racial prejudice explicitly next to discrimination for reasons of race, colour or ethnic origin (Article I).[15]

Racism has been a motivating factor in social discrimination, racial segregation, hate speech and violence (such as pogroms, genocides and ethnic cleansings). Despite the persistence of racial stereotypes, humor and epithets in much everyday language, racial discrimination is illegal in many countries.

Ironically, anti-racism has also become a political instrument of abuse. Some politicians have practiced race baiting in an attempt to win votes. In a reversal of values, anti-racism is being propagated by despots in the service of obscurantism and the suppression of women. Said philosofist Pascal Bruckner:[16]

"Anti-racism in the UN has become the ideology of totalitarian regimes who use it in their own interests."


Ethnic nationalism
Further information: Ethnic nationalism and Romantic nationalism
After the Napoleonic Wars, Europe was confronted with the new "nationalities question," leading to ceaseless reconfigurations of the European map, on which the frontiers between the states had been delimited during the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Nationalism had made its first, striking appearance with the invention of the levée en masse by the French revolutionaries, thus inventing mass conscription in order to be able to defend the newly-founded Republic against the Ancien Régime order represented by the European monarchies. This led to the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802) and then to the Napoleonic conquests, and to the subsequent European-wide debates on the concepts and realities of nations, and in particular of nation-states. The Westphalia Treaty had divided Europe into various empires and kingdoms (Ottoman Empire, Holy Roman Empire, Swedish Empire, Kingdom of France, etc.), and for centuries wars were waged between princes (Kabinettskriege in German).

Modern nation-states appeared in the wake of the French Revolution, with the formation of patriotic sentiments for the first time in Spain during the Peninsula War (1808-1813 - known in Spanish as the Independence War). Despite the restoration of the previous order with the 1815 Congress of Vienna, the "nationalities question" became the main problem of Europe during the Industrial Era, leading in particular to the 1848 Revolutions, the Italian unification completed during the 1871 Franco-Prussian War, which itself culminated in the proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, thus achieving the German unification. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire, the "sick man of Europe," was confronted with endless nationalist movements, which, along with the dissolving of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, would lead to the creation after World War I of the various nation-states of the Balkans, which were always confronted, and remain so today, with the existence of "national minorities" in their borders.[17] Ethnic nationalism, which advocated the belief in a hereditary membership of the nation, made its appearance in the historical context surrounding the creation of the modern nation-states. One of its main influences was the Romantic nationalist movement at the turn of the 19th century, represented by figures such as Johann Herder (1744-1803), Johan Fichte (1762-1814) in the Addresses to the German Nation (1808), Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), or also, in France, Jules Michelet (1798-1874). It was opposed to liberal nationalism, represented by authors such as Ernest Renan (1823-1892), who conceived of the nation as a community which, instead of being based on the Volk ethnic group and on a specific, common language, was founded on the subjective will to live together ("the nation is a daily plebiscite", 1882) or also John Stuart Mill (1806-1873).[18]

Ethnic nationalism quickly blended itself with scientific racist discourses, as well as with "continental imperialist" (Hannah Arendt, 1951[19]) discourses, for example in the pan-Germanism discourses, which postulated the racial superiority of the German Volk. The Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband), created in 1891, promoted German imperialism, "racial hygiene" and was opposed to intermarriage with Jews. Another, popular current, the Völkisch movement, was also an important proponent of the German ethnic nationalist discourse, which it also combined with modern anti-semitism. Members of the Völkisch movement, in particular the Thule Society, would participate in the founding of the German Workers' Party (DAP) in Munich in 1918, the predecessor of the NSDAP Nazi party. Pan-Germanism and played a decisive role in the interwar period of the 1920s-1930s.[19]

These currents began to associate the idea of the nation with the biological concept of a "master race" (often the "Aryan race" or "Nordic race") issued from the scientific racist discourse. They conflated nationalities with ethnic groups, called "races", in a radical distinction from previous racial discourses which posited the existence of a "race struggle" inside the nation and the state itself. Furthermore, they believed that political boundaries should mirror these alleged racial and ethnic groups, thus justifying ethnic cleansing in order to achieve "racial purity" and also to achieve ethnic homogeneity in the nation-state.

Such racist discourses, combined with nationalism, were not however limited to pan-Germanism. In France, the transition from Republican, liberal nationalism, to ethnic nationalism, which made nationalism a characteristic of far-right movements in France, took place during the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the 19th century. During several years, a nation-wide querelle affected French society, concerning the alleged treason of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish military officer. The country polarized itself into two opposite camps, one represented by Émile Zola, who wrote J'accuse in defense of Alfred Dreyfus, and the other represented by the nationalist poet Maurice Barrès (1862-1923), one of the founders of the ethnic nationalist discourse in France.[20] At the same time, Charles Maurras (1868-1952), founder of the monarchist Action française movement, theorized the "anti-France," composed of the "four confederate states of Protestants, Jews, Freemasons and foreigners" (his actual word for the latter being the pejorative métèques). Indeed, to him the first three were all "internal foreigners," who threatened the ethnic unity of the French people.


Ethnic conflicts
Further information: Ethnicity
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 itself 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. 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) Basil Davidson insists in his documentary, Africa: Different but Equal, that racism, in fact, only just recently surfaced—as late as the 1800s, due to the need for a justification for 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 populations drastically decreased. 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).

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda argued that 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 preferenced too.


Academic variants
Further information: Race and intelligence

Drawings from Josiah C. Nott and George Gliddon's Indigenous races of the earth (1857), which suggested black people ranked between white people and chimpanzees in terms of intelligence.Academic racism was pushed by white supremacists during the period when white people garnered great profits from slavery and colonialism. Academic racism had the effect of attempting to deny the culture, history and ancestry from the victims of the profitable slave and colonial systems. Owen 'Alik Shahadah comments on this racism by stating: "Historically Africans are made to sway like leaves on the wind, impervious and indifferent to any form of civilization, a people absent from scientific discovery, philosophy or the higher arts. We are left to believe that almost nothing can come out of Africa, other than raw material."[21] Scottish philosopher and economist David Hume said, "I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There scarcely ever was a civilised nation of that complexion, nor even any individual, eminent either in action or in speculation. No ingenious manufacture among them, no arts, no sciences."[22] German philosopher Immanuel Kant stated: "The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The Negroes are far below them, and at the lowest point are a part of the American people."[23]

In the nineteenth century, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel declared that "Africa is no historical part of the world." Hegel further claimed that blacks had no "sense of personality; their spirit sleeps, remains sunk in itself, makes no advance, and thus parallels the compact, undifferentiated mass of the African continent" (On Blackness Without Blacks: Essays on the Image of the Black in Germany, Boston: C.W. Hall, 1982, p. 94). Fewer than 30 years before Nazi Germany started World War II, the German Otto Weininger, claimed: "A genius has perhaps scarcely ever appeared amongst the negroes, and the standard of their morality is almost universally so low that it is beginning to be acknowledged in America that their emancipation was an act of imprudence" (Sex and Character, New York: G.P. Putnam, 1906, p. 302).

The German conservative Oswald Spengler remarked on what he perceived as the culturally degrading influence of Africans in modern Western culture: in The Hour of Decision Spengler denounced "the 'happy ending' of an empty existence, the boredom of which has brought to jazz music and Negro dancing to perform the Death March for a great Culture" (The Hour of Decision, pp. 227-228). During the Nazi era, German scientists rearranged academia to support claims of a grand Aryan agent behind the splendors of all human civilizations, including India and Ancient Egypt.[23]


People Show (Völkerschau) in Stuttgart (Germany) in 1928.
Scientific variants
Main article: Scientific racism
Further information: Unilineal evolution
The modern biological definition of race developed in the 19th century with scientific racist theories. The term scientific racism refers to the use of science to justify and support racist beliefs, which goes back to at least the early 18th century, though it gained most of its influence in the mid-19th century, during the New Imperialism period. Also known as academic racism, such theories first needed to overcome the Church's resistance to positivist accounts of history, and its support of monogenism, that is that all human beings were originated from the same ancestors, in accordance with creationist accounts of history.

These racist theories put forth on scientific hypothesis were combined with unilineal theories of social progress which postulated the superiority of the European civilization over the rest of the world. Furthermore, they frequently made use of the idea of "survival of the fittest", a term coined by Herbert Spencer in 1864, associated with ideas of competition which were named social Darwinism in the 1940s. Charles Darwin himself opposed the idea of rigid racial differences in The Descent of Man (1871) in which he argued that humans were all of one species, sharing common descent. He recognised racial differences as varieties of humanity, and emphasised the close similarities between people of all races in mental faculties, tastes, dispositions and habits, while still contrasting the culture of the "lowest savages" with European civilization.[24][25]

At the end of the 19th century, proponents of scientific racism intertwined themselves with eugenics discourses of "degeneration of the race" and "blood heredity." Henceforth, scientific racist discourses could be defined as the combination of polygenism, unilinealism, social darwinism and eugenism. They found their scientific legitimacy on physical anthropology, anthropometry, craniometry, phrenology, physiognomy and others now discredited disciplines in order to formulate racist prejudices.

Before being disqualified in the 20th century by the American school of cultural anthropology (Franz Boas, etc.), the British school of social anthropology (Bronisław Malinowski, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, etc.), the French school of ethnology (Claude Lévi-Strauss, etc.), as well as the discovery of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, such sciences, in particular anthropometry, were used to deduce behaviours and psychological characteristics from outward, physical appearances. The neo-Darwinian synthesis, first developed in the 1930s, eventually led to a gene-centered view of evolution in the 1960s, which seemed at first to be sufficient proof of the inanity of the "scientific racist" theories of the 19th centuries, which based their conception of evolution on "races", a concept which first appeared to lose any sense at the genetic level. However, the modern resurgence of racist theories, in particular those related to the race and intelligence controversy, seems to show that genetics could also be used for ideological, racist purposes.


Heredity and eugenics
Further information: Eugenics
The first theory of eugenics was developed in 1869 by Francis Galton (1822-1911), who used the then popular concept of degeneration. He applied statistics to study human differences and the alleged "inheritance of intelligence," foreshadowing future uses of "intelligence testing" by the anthropometry school. Such theories were vividly described by the writer Emile Zola (1840-1902), who started publishing in 1871 a twenty-novel cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart, where he linked heredity to behavior. Thus, Zola described the high-born Rougons as those involved in politics (Son Excellence Eugène Rougon) and medicine (Le Docteur Pascal) and the low-born Macquarts as those fatally falling into alcoholism (L'Assommoir), prostitution (Nana), and homicide (La Bête humaine).

During the rise of Nazism in Germany, some scientists in Western nations worked to debunk the regime's racial theories. A few argued against racist ideologies and discrimination, even if they believed in the alleged existence of biological races. However, in the fields of anthropology and biology, these were minority positions until the mid-20th century.[26] According to the 1950 UNESCO statement, The Race Question, an international project to debunk racist theories had been attempted in the mid-1930s. However, this project had been abandoned. Thus, in 1950, UNESCO declared that it had resumed:

up again, after a lapse of fifteen years, a project which the International Institute for Intellectual Co-operation has wished to carry through but which it had to abandon in deference to the appeasement policy of the pre-war period. The race question had become one of the pivots of Nazi ideology and policy. Masaryk and Beneš took the initiative of calling for a conference to re-establish in the minds and consciences of men everywhere the truth about race... Nazi propaganda was able to continue its baleful work unopposed by the authority of an international organisation.

The Third Reich's racial policies, its eugenics programs and the extermination of Jews in the Holocaust, as well as Gypsies in the Porrajmos and others minorities led to a change in opinions about scientific research into race after the war. Changes within scientific disciplines, such as the rise of the Boasian school of anthropology in the United States contributed to this shift. These theories were strongly denounced in the 1950 UNESCO statement, signed by internationally renowned scholars, and titled The Race Question.


Polygenism and racial typologies
Further information: Polygenism and Typology (anthropology)
Works such as Arthur Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-1855) may be considered as one of the first theorizations of this new racism, founded on an essentialist notion of race, which opposed the former racial discourse, of Boulainvilliers for example, which saw in races a fundamentally historical reality which changed over time. Gobineau thus attempted to frame racism within the terms of biological differences among human beings, giving it the legitimacy of biology. He was one of the first theorists to postulate polygenism, stating that there were, at the origins of the world, various discrete "races." Gobineau's theories would be expanded, in France, by Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854-1936)'s typology of races, who published in 1899 The Aryan and his Social Role, in which he claimed that the white, "Aryan race", "dolichocephalic", was opposed to the "brachycephalic" race, of whom the "Jew" was the archetype. Vacher de Lapoug thus created a hierarchical classification of races, in which he identified the "Homo europaeus (Teutonic, Protestant, etc.), the "Homo alpinus" (Auvergnat, Turkish, etc.), and finally the "Homo mediterraneus" (Neapolitan, Andalus, etc.) He assimilated races and social classes, considering that the French upper class was a representation of the Homo europaeus, while the lower class represented the Homo alpinus. Applying Galton's eugenics to his theory of races, Vacher de Lapouge's "selectionism" aimed first at achieving the annihilation of trade unionists, considered to be a "degenerate"; second, creating types of man each destined to one end, in order to prevent any contestation of labour conditions. His "anthroposociology" thus aimed at blocking social conflict by establishing a fixed, hierarchical social order[27]

The same year than Vacher de Lapouge, William Z. Ripley used identical racial classification in The Races of Europe (1899), which would have a great influence in the United States. Others famous scientific authors include 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") or Madison Grant, a eugenicist and author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916).


Human Zoos
Human Zoos (called "People Shows"), 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.[28][29] 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. Carl Hagenbeck, inventor of the modern zoos, exhibited animals aside of human beings considered as "savages".[30][31] 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.[32] A "Congolese village" was on display as late as 1958 at the Brussels' World Fair.


Evolutionary theories about the origins of racism
Biologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides were puzzled by the fact that race is one of the three characteristics most often used in brief descriptions of individuals (the others are age and sex). They reasoned that natural selection would not have favoured the evolution of an instinct for using race as a classification, because most of the earliest humans, who lived in Africa, would never have met a member of a different race. Tooby and Cosmides hypothesized that modern people use race as a proxy (rough-and-ready indicator) for coalition membership, since a better-than-random guess about "which side" another person is on will be helpful if one does not actually know in advance.

Their colleague Robert Kurzban designed an experiment whose results appeared to support this hypothesis. Using the Memory confusion protocol, they presented subjects with pictures of individuals and sentences, allegedly spoken by these individuals, which presented two sides of a debate. The errors which the subjects made in recalling who said what indicated that they sometimes misattributed a statement to a speaker of the same race as the "correct" speaker, although they also sometimes misattributed a statement to a speaker "on the same side" as the "correct" speaker. In a second run of the experiment, the team also distinguished the "sides" in the debate by clothing of similar colors; and in this case the effect of racial similarity in causing mistakes almost vanished, being replaced by the color of their clothing. In other words, the first group of subjects, with no clues from clothing, used race as a visual guide to guessing who was on which side of the debate; the second group of subjects used the clothing color as their main visual clue, and the effect of race became very small. [33]


U.S government poster from WWII featuring a Japanese soldier depicted as a rat. Mainly dehumanization, but also racism, played a role in the American mutilation of Japanese war dead during World War II
As state-sponsored activity
Main articles: Nazism and race, Racial policy of Nazi Germany, Generalplan Ost, Eugenics in Showa Japan, Apartheid in South Africa, Racial segregation in the United States, Anti-Chinese legislation in Indonesia, and Anti-Japanese sentiment in Korea
State racism played a role in the Nazi Germany regime and fascist regimes in Europe, and in the first part of Japan's Shōwa period. State racism also played a major part in the formation of the Dominican Republic's identity [7] and violent actions encouraged by Dominican governmental xenophobia against Haitans and "Haitian looking" people. Currently the Dominican Republic employs a de-facto system of separatism for children and grandchildren of Haitians and black Dominicans, denying them birth certificates, education and access to health care.[34] These governments advocated and implemented policies that were racist, xenophobic and, in case of Nazism, genocidal. [35][36][37]


In history

In the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance
Further information: Limpieza de sangre
While racism is most commonly accepted to be a product of European colonialism during the early modern period, several authors have put forward the idea that racism may have its roots in Classical Antiquity or the Middle Ages. Chouki El Hamel has cited the Babylonian Talmud, which divides humankind between the three sons of Noah, stating that "the descendants of Ham are cursed by being black, and [it] depicts Ham as a sinful man and his progeny as degenerates."[38] Bernard Lewis has cited the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle who, in his discussion of slavery, stated that while Greeks are free by nature, 'barbarians' (non-Greeks) are slaves by nature, in that it is in their nature to be more willing to submit to despotic government.[39]

Lewis also cites the Arab Empire, the first "truly universal civilization," which brought together for the first time "peoples as diverse as the Chinese, the Indians, the people of the Middle East and North Africa, black Africans, and white Europeans." While the Qur'an, the Prophet Muhammad, and the overwhelming majority of Islamic jurists and theologians, all stated that humankind has a single origin and rejected the idea of certain ethnic groups being superior to others, some ethnic prejudices later developed among Arabs due to several reasons: their extensive conquests and slave trade; the influence of Aristotelian ideas regarding slavery, echoed by Muslim philosophers such as Al-Farabi and Avicenna, particularly in regards to black and Turkic peoples;[39] and the influence of Judeo-Christian ideas regarding divisions among humankind.[40] In response to such views, the Afro-Arab author Al-Jahiz, himself of East African descent, wrote a book entitled Superiority Of The Blacks To The Whites,[41] and explained why the Zanj (East Africans) were black in terms of environmental determinism in the "On the Zanj" chapter of The Essays.[42] By the 14th century, a significant number of slaves came from sub-Saharan Africa, leading to the likes of Egyptian historian Al-Abshibi (1388-1446) writing: "It is said that when the [black] slave is sated, he fornicates, when he is hungry, he steals."[43] The 14th century Arab sociologist Ibn Khaldun compared black people to "dumb animals",[44][45] but was equally critical towards his own people, the Arabs, who he compared to "untamable animals and dumb beasts of prey".[46] He also dispelled the Hamitic theory as a myth, stating that black skin was due to environmental determinism and not because of any curse.[47] The Arabic geographer Ibn Battuta, who had visited the Mali Empire in 1352, wrote many positive comments on black people.[45][48]

Richard E. Nisbett has said that the question of racial superiority may go back at least a thousand years, to the time when the Umayyad Caliphate invaded Hispania, occupying most of the Iberian Peninsula for six centuries, where they founded the advanced civilization of Al-Andalus (711-1492). Al-Andalus coincided with La Convivencia, an era of religious tolerance, and with the Golden age of Jewish culture in Iberia (912, the rule of Abd-ar-Rahman III - 1066, Granada massacre).[49] It was followed by a violent Reconquista under the Reyes Catolicos (Catholic Kings), Ferdinand V and Isabella I. The Catholic Spaniards then formulated the Cleanliness of blood doctrine. It was during this time in history that the Western concept of aristocratic "blue blood" emerged in a highly racialized and implicitly white supremacist context, as author Robert Lacey explains:

It was the Spaniards who gave the world the notion that an aristocrat's blood is not red but blue. The Spanish nobility started taking shape around the ninth century in classic military fashion, occupying land as warriors on horseback. They were to continue the process for more than five hundred years, clawing back sections of the peninsula from its Moorish occupiers, and a nobleman demonstrated his pedigree by holding up his sword arm to display the filigree of blue-blooded veins beneath his pale skin--proof that his birth had not been contaminated by the dark-skinned enemy. Sangre azul, blue blood, was thus a euphemism for being a white man--Spain's own particular reminder that the refined footsteps of the aristocracy through history carry the rather less refined spoor of racism.[50]

Following the expulsion of most Sephardic Jews from the Iberian peninsula, the remaining Jews and Muslims were forced to convert to Roman Catholicism, becoming "New Christians" which were despised and discriminated by the "Old Christians". An Inquisition was carried out by members of the Dominican Order in order to weed out converts that still practiced Judaism and Islam in secret. The system and ideology of the limpieza de sangre ostracized Christian converts from society, regardless of their actual degree of sincerity in their faith. In Portugal, the legal distinction between New and Old Christian was only ended through a legal decree issued by the Marquis of Pombal in 1772, almost three centuries after the implementation of the racist discrimination. The limpieza de sangre doctrine was also very common in the colonization of the Americas, where it led to the racial separation of the various peoples in the colonies and created a very intricate list of nomenclature to describe one's precise race and, by consequence, one's place in society. This precise classification was described by Eduardo Galeano in the Open Veins of Latin America (1971). It included, among others terms, mestizo (50% Spaniard and 50% Native American), castizo (75% European and 25% Native American), Spaniard (87.5% European and 12.5% Native American), Mulatto (50% European and 50% African), Albarazado (43.75% Native American, 29.6875% European, and 26.5625% African), etc.

At the end of the Renaissance, the Valladolid debate (1550-1551) concerning the treatment of natives of the "New World" opposed the Dominican friar and Bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé de Las Casas to another Dominican philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. The latter argued that "Indians" were natural slaves because they had no souls, and were therefore beneath humanity. Thus, reducing them to slavery or serfdom was in accordance with Catholic theology and natural law. To the contrary, Bartolomé de Las Casas argued that the Amerindians were free men in the natural order and deserved the same treatment as others, according to Catholic theology. It was one of the many controversy concerning racism, slavery and Eurocentrism that would arise in the following centuries.

Although anti-Semitism has a long European history, related to Christianism (anti-Judaism), 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 Early Modern period as the "disc
quote:
Originally posted by ShugaPush:
If its about gender, its sexism, not racism.


If you look carefully you will see that the article overview is about discrimination, sexism being one type. Then it narrows down to racial discrimination and goes on ad nauseum about that. I don't see where it suggests that discrimination based on gender is racism.

Discrimination against a black woman or against a hispanic male could be both. People who discriminate don't usually restrict their sense of superiority to only one characteristic.
quote:
Originally posted by BarryD:
quote:
Originally posted by ShugaPush:
If its about gender, its sexism, not racism.


If you look carefully you will see that the article overview is about discrimination, sexism being one type. Then it narrows down to racial discrimination and goes on ad nauseum about that. I don't see where it suggests that discrimination based on gender is racism.

Discrimination against a black woman or against a hispanic male could be both. People who discriminate don't usually restrict their sense of superiority to only one characteristic.


An Indian Hispanic male or a black Hispanic male, not a caucasian Hispanic male.
quote:
Originally posted by NYTrooper:
quote:
Thank you for showing me the magnitude and scope of the term "racism". It does indeed include ethnicities, nationalities, sexes, religions and more.

It seems those who believe racism is alive and well have a point, huh?



Yep, racism has, does and always will exist. I dont think anyone is exempt.


I dont think that even obama can make that change happen ,but he mgiht if he starts locking us up lol Razzer Cool

Add Reply

Post

Untitled Document
×
×
×
×
Link copied to your clipboard.
×