Folks, if you were to visit the world’s largest free online database of library catalogs (worldcat.org), and do a search for books on race/racism in the English language you will come up with nearly 16,000 books on this one topic! Now, to be sure, the number will include several editions/reprints of the same books; nevertheless, you do get an adequate indication that the Western world is seriously obsessed with this topic. (Plus, one is not even considering here the tens of thousands of journal articles.) And perhaps it is not without reason. For, if we were to identify the major ideas that have helped to shape the modern world then at least three stand out above all others, one is industrial capitalism (I include here it’s antecedents the Renaissance, and the so-called scientific revolution, and its progeny, the Enlightenment); the second is racism (includes all its variants such as ethnicism and nationalism); and the third is democracy (more in its procedural sense than in its authentic sense).

From the vantage point of today, the irony is that despite this obsession there appears to be an inability among many to come to analytical grips with the whys and wherefores of this deeply unhealthy feature of modern democratic societies. Even the seemingly simple task of defining what racism is appears problematic (albeit for justifiable reasons as will soon become clear). Be that as it may, to start us off here is a brief usable definition that is up to the task of encapsulating its key features:

Racism is, at once, an ideology (meaning a systematic set of beliefs, in this case fallacious beliefs, that govern and validate human behavior) and systematic behavioral practice, at both interpersonal and institutional levels, of oppression based on the essentialist "othering" of human beings of a different hue and/or culture that was first invented by Europeans, beginning roughly in the fifteenth century when they began their voyages of exploitation across the world—fueled initially by merchant capitalism and later industrial capitalism—to legitimate a racially-based imperialist system of economic exploitation and oppression underwritten by military prowess and sanctified first by an occidental version of the Christian religion and later by a racialized occidental science, at the heart of which was the denial of the humanity of those so victimized. (The key words here are essentialism, occident, ideology, system, exploitation, humanity, and capitalism—plus one more should be added, history.)

That’s it. That’s what racism is. It’s simple.[1] One definitely does not need sixteen thousand books to explain what racism is. Or so it would seem; or so it would seem. The truth, however, is that human beings are behaviorally complex animals; hence things are never that simple. What is complicated about racism, and one must stress here that it is complicated, is how and why racism evolved and how it has been operationalized in practice, across the centuries up to the present, even in the face of resistance by those victimized by it.

Before we proceed further, however, some important disclosures/disclaimers are in order that you should keep in mind:

First, from a strictly scientific point of view, there is no such thing as “race” despite the physical differences one can usually observe among humankind in terms of skin color, hair texture, facial features, etc., unless one is referring to the one race we all belong to: the human race (who, by the way, first evolved in the Garden of Eden—also known as Africa). However, from a sociopolitical and economic perspective one can still talk about different “races” as identified by physical features (but while still recognizing that these are artificially constructed historically contingent, and therefore unstable, sociopolitical categorizations of human beings in a given society and not ones rooted in biology).

Second, in some places at certain times the roles performed by race/racism in society have been and are performed by ethnicity/ethnicism. Therefore, race/racism can be used interchangeably with ethnic/ethnicity/ethnicism when these latter terms signify race-like oppression—which of course would involve "othering" based on stereotypes and the like. (Ethnicity refers to the distinctions between social groups based on cultural differences--and not physical differences--such as language or religion or even, one can convincingly suggest, political ideology when pointing to the experiences of countries like Cambodia with its unique history of political genocide.)

Third, as you go through this entry, it is very important that you recognize that although many examples used in this entry come from the United States it does not mean that racism today exists only in the United States; in fact, in almost every country in the world where there are racial/ethnic minorities the horrible tragedy is that you will find virulent forms of racism/ethnicism against the backdrop of globalized capitalism (countries that immediately come to mind include Algeria, Argentina, Bolivia, Burundi, Canada, China, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mali, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Syria, Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom, and so on, and so on).[2]

Fourth, victimization by oppression does not, in of itself, automatically make you a morally superior person. There is no special or chosen race morally superior to others (even if you are tempted to believe that you belong to one, which in itself is a form of racism/ethnicism, because of all the suffering that your race/ethnicity has endured at the hands of others). For example, if we could go back two thousand years into history and were able to ask God, or some other supernatural power of your choice, to make this one change for us but keep everything else the same: transpose Africans with Europeans in their respective geographic places, today we would be grappling with black “Euroracism” instead of white “Euroracism” (and whites of course would be the victims). In other words, racism is not genetically-rooted within a particular group of people—who today happen to be mostly those of European ancestry, as a consequence of historical serendipity—regardless of what the racists so fervently claim.

Fifth, from the perspective of analysis be extremely vigilant against the temptation to reify societies. To explain: societies do not exist as concrete objects that you can see, touch, or feel. Rather, they are intangible social constructions. Therefore, if you, as an individual, find that your personal experiences do not reflect some of the statements made in this entry, it does not imply that the statements are not applicable to a broad group of others. You, by yourself, are not society. So, take a chill pill, calm down, and carry on.

Mention the words race or racism in most Western countries today, such as the United States, and immediately most people become uptight, defensive, and even angry: the racists, because they claim that it no longer exists today, or if they agree that it does exist then at least they themselves are not racists; and the targets of racism, because they know all too well that racism is all around them, institutionally as well as interpersonally. Yet, the irony is that the racists and their victims, both, have a very poor understanding of why racism persists, what forms it takes, what role it plays in society, and how (or whether) it can be ever be eradicated.

Folks, what you must know is this: while we who live in a society such as this one are ALL affected by racism in one way or another from the time we are born, that does not in itself guarantee that we will understand it fully. The fact is racism, like its other counterparts (classism, sexism, etc.), is a very complex ideology and system of oppression. Its complexity stems from the dialectical interplay—at both institutional and interpersonal levels—between the three foundational factors of structure, ideology, and behavioral practice; and on the basis of which at least ten critical issues that emerge out of this interplay have to, perforce, be considered. These are:

(a) the mythical basis of the ideology;

(b) the mode of its origins and transmission;

(c) the variety of forms it takes, depending upon historical time period;

(d) the role it performs in society;

(e) its relationship to other ideologies of oppression: sexism, ethnicism, classism, etc.,

(f) the problem of contradiction: the futile attempt to create a racially egalitarian society in an inherently non-egalitarian one; and

(g) the fallacy of the concept of "reverse racism" (or "reverse discrimination").

Then there is the matter of (h) the geographic specificity of certain forms of racism. Three such forms are well-known today. So, with specific reference to most Western countries (such as Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States), racism, at the ideological level, takes the specific form of what some sociologists term as whiteness. This kind of geographic specificity is akin to two other forms, Antisemitism and Islamophobia, which however are found across the world today. There is yet another kind of geographically specific form of racism (or ethnicism to be precise), widely known but not clearly understood, and that is caste, found in India and among the Indian diaspora (as well as in Japan, to give another example).

(i) Then there is the problem of what theoretical approach to take in the study of racism, as an intellectual endeavor (such as in colleges and universities). And as if all this is not enough, there is (j)  the matter of suggesting credible strategies for overcoming racism/ethnicism to the extent possible within the parameters of a capitalist democracy.

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NOTE

[1] Folks, you will notice that the heading of this entry includes the word "racialism." So, what is the difference between the two words racism and racialism. In general--repeat, in general--the two words are interchangeable. However, strictly speaking, I consider racialism to refer to the ideology behind racism, while racism (the actual practice of racist discrimination) is the practical implementation of this ideology. In other words, the dichotomy here is represented by ideology versus practice.

[2] To repeat: although examples used in this definition of race/racism come primarily from the United States, it should be stressed that the aim of this definition is not so much to show that the United States is a racist society—a fact that cannot be disputed—but rather to arrive at an understanding of what racism is and what functions it performs in racist societies. 

Racism, today is found in almost all societies, except that it takes a different form in those societies where all belong to the same race. This form can be “ethnicism” for example. In many countries of Africa and Asia, the role performed by racism is performed by “ethnicism.” In some societies racism is substituted with discrimination based on linguistic and/or religious differences. Plus one must not forget that in almost all societies today one will find discrimination of another kind: it is a type that is even more pervasive than racism, though it operates in almost the same way as racism does and performs almost the same functions: sexism. But whether bigotry and discrimination are based on racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, gender (or any other biologically-determined immutable factors) the end-goal remains the same for those who practice this bigotry and discrimination: to dominate and exploit their victims on the basis of “unjustified entitlement.”