Folks, racism can take the following fairly distinct, but related, structural (institutionalized) forms: 

(a) genocidal racism; 

(b) dominative racism; 

(c) aversive racism; 

(d) institutional racism (colorblind racism); 

(e) juridical racism; 

(f) ethnicism (ethnocentrism); and 

(g) neo-racism (cultural racism).  

However, there are also non-structural forms of racism, of which these six stand out for mention: 

(a) internalized racism; 

(b) homogamous racism; 

(c) internalized sub-racism; 

(d) interpersonal (individualized) racism; 

(e) backslide racism; and 

(f) xenophobia 

Please note that the terms "racism" and "racialism" are generally used interchangeably, in common parlance. However, for our purposes they have a distinctive meaning where racism refers to the actual practice of racist discrimination, while racialism refers to the ideology behind this practice (e.g., essentialism, stereotyping, pseudoscientific racist theories, etc.) that seeks to justify this discrimination. 

(I) Structural or Systemic Racism

(a) Genocidal Racism

Genocidal racism--as the term implies, is the attempt to totally annihilate a group of people for whatever reason. Some classic examples of this most brutal form of racism would include: The settlement of the Americas by Europeans at the expense of Native Americans; the Shoah (the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Europe); and the Rwandan Genocide. (The last example could be considered as "genocidal ethnicism.")

(b) Dominative Racism

This is racism aimed at dominating victims in order to directly exploit their labor, as in the case of the racist exploitation of African Americans in the South. Note that at the level of interpersonal relations, under conditions of dominative racism, intimate relationships between the racist and the victim are common. Not surprisingly, in the racist South of the past enslaved African American women often ran the household of the white master: from house cleaning and cooking to child-rearing--and sometimes even child-bearing! (By the way, a similar situation obtains to day in the West [California, Texas, etc.] but involving primarily Hispanic American women.)

(c) Aversive Racism

As the term implies, it denotes the type of racism where the racist wants to put the greatest physical and social distance possible between himself/ herself and the target. For example: aversive white racists would never dream of permitting African Americans to enter their homes, let alone cook their food or babysit their children. The logical conclusion of this kind of discrimination from the perspective of the victim is genocide. The European Jews were victims of aversive racism. In this country, wherever dominative racism disappeared it was replaced by aversive racism; consequently, today it is aversive racism that is the most common form of racism. At the structural level, aversive racism is manifest in such ways as de facto residential segregation.

At the interpersonal level, the desire by aversive racists for as much physical and social distance as possible between themselves and other races stems from the incorporation into their psyche, through early childhood socialization, at the minimum the triple racist stereotypes of dirt, sex and trust (mentioned above). Have you looked lately who students of different ethnicities/races sit with in cafeterias on this campus and other large U.S. university campuses? As you can guess, laws cannot really overcome this form of racism. Why? Because it is too pervasive and yet very subtle to the point where, sometimes, both the racist and the victim may not even be aware of its existence at a given moment. A classic example of the latter phenomenon, in this society, is the subconscious belief by almost all whites (including, ironically, non-racist whites--not the same as anti-racist whites) that their whiteness entitles them to a place above everyone else, regardless of what aspect of society is under consideration: employment, housing, health, religion, culture, language, etc., etc. The only whites who do not suffer from this “white is best; white is right” psychological disease are those whites who are actively engaged in struggling with themselves to overcome this disease in order to become normal and mentally healthy human beings

Psychosocial Mechanisms

The prevalence of aversive racism is not rooted simply in material advantages (represented for example by residential segregation that materially favors whites) but is also sustained by psychosocial mechanisms of which three stand out. One is socialization, already mentioned above; the other two are something called implicit bias and racism as contagion. 

(Text continues below, however, you must also study the images--you know the deal.)

People, it is important to note here that aversive racism is not, however, a monopoly held only by Whites. Other groups can and do exhibit this form of racism too; for example (in United States): Jews against blacks; blacks against Jews; blacks against Latinos and Asians; Asians against blacks, etc.; etc. Consider: In recent years, many Black people, frustrated by the seeming intractability of white institutional racism, and influenced by the resurgence of racist propaganda of white racists against Brown people--taking the form of Islamophobia, immigrant bashing, and so on--coupled with a toxic enchantment with identity politics, have become petty aversive racists at the level of interpersonal interactions (e.g., in the workplace, in schools and colleges, in neighborhoods, etc.) in relation to "Brown" people, such as Arabs, Asians and Latinos, but strangely, not whites. It is "petty" in the sense that lacking institutional power, Blacks cannot really do much in terms of negatively affecting the socioeconomic circumstances of Brown people (that is at the same level that whites can). This form of aversive racism is primarily driven by scapegoating where blacks are scapegoating Brown people for the real institutionalized discrimination that Blacks  face from whites in employment, housing, education, healthcare, the justice system, policing, and so on.

Notice too that there is considerable irony here: Brown people were not responsible for enslaving Black people in the U.S. which, ultimately, is the origin of today's institutionalized white racism against blacks (and others). However, if you think this is bizarre, consider also that Blacks who can trace their roots to the slave era may also aversively scapegoat Blacks who are recent immigrants (e.g. from the Caribbean and Africa)--this behavior could be labeled "aversive ethnicism." It gets even more bizarre. Because of centuries of brainwashing many Black women have come to believe that beauty requires possession of straight hair similar to that of whites. So, enter the Asian hair industry to supply the limitless demand for Asian hair by Black women, not only here in United States, but even in Africa and elsewhere.[1] 

While you are reading this entry on race/racism, I want you to stop for a moment and ask yourself this question: If I am alone in an elevator would I be uncomfortable if a person from group X enters it, even though I have never come across that person before and the person appears to pose absolutely no threat? (Substitute group X with whatever racial/ ethnic groups you encounter in your daily lives that you can think of.) If your answer is yes with respect to ANY group, you are a racist. Not only that, but think about this: it means that you are a potential candidate for recruitment by a racist organization like the Neo-Nazis (under appropriate circumstances). How do you think a minority, the Nazis, in Nazi Germany were able to convince the majority of Germans to murder millions upon millions of people within a short period of 5 to 6 years? They exploited the existing aversive racism that went back hundreds of years toward Jews that most Germans and many other Europeans harbored. So, if you are one of those who becomes “uncomfortable” when you encounter in your daily life a person of another color then you need to seriously consider psychiatric treatment because you are mentally sick! Here’s another thought experiment: in this society (the U.S.), if you have to talk to another person who you consider as different from you, in terms of race/ethnicity, are you able to comfortably look the person in the eye? If not, then you are certainly a racist/ethnicist (seek psychiatric treatment).  

(Text continues below, however, you must also study the images--you know the deal.)

(d) Institutional Racism (Colorblind Racism)

Institutional racism, in the U.S., is closely tied up with aversive racism. Institutional racism, also known as structural racism or colorblind racism or systemic racism, in contrast to interpersonal racism (the day-today racism found in interpersonal encounters between individuals) refers to historically-determined overt and/or covert racist discriminatory practices that may be deliberate or simply be motivated by ignorance, prejudice, stereotypes, and the like in the operation of socio-economic and political institutions of society (ranging from schools to hospitals, from prisons to the military, from the police to newspapers, from state legislatures to churches, from banks to city governments) where the discriminatory target is entire groups of people rather than specific individuals. Institutional racism originates from a past where juridical racism was the order of the day.[2] So, for example, when inner cities— where the majority of racial minorities in U.S. urban areas live because of historically determined, racialized residential segregation—continue to lack equitable access to resources (ranging from decent schooling through adequate social amenities to jobs and employment), then that constitutes a manifestation of a range of forms of institutional racism.

In United States, in recent years, because of an ultra-right conservative Supreme Court (that even includes an ultra-conservative African American justice by the name of Clarence Thomas whose appointment to the bench was, most ironically, colored by his invocation of racism on the part of Congress during his confirmation hearings where credible charges of sexual harassment were leveled against him by an African American woman of integrity, Anita Hill), institutional racism has been given a juridical mandate. In the view of this Court (with the exception of a minority of justices), institutional racism in United States is supposedly a thing of the past, and, therefore, there is no longer any need for any government policy in any area of life that seeks to eliminate institutional racism. And it is encapsulated in a well-known quote authored by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., in a majority decision outlawing voluntary (repeat: voluntary) desegregation efforts in schooling in the combined U.S. Supreme Court cases, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, 551 U.S. 701 (2007): “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” 

While one is left wondering on which planet the archconservative Chief Justice resides, this white supremacist line of thinking may sound logical and seemingly anti-racist in intent; it is, in reality, a very racist view because it deliberately ignores the historically-determined racism that continues to be pervasive in United States today—attested to by massive evidence, both research-based and the daily experiences of ordinary individuals. In this scenario, it must be stressed a million times, the key driver of the current racialization of U.S. society is the continuing racialized residential segregation that is almost reminiscent of racist segregation in apartheid South Africa.[3] On almost every measure one cares to look at—ranging from housing to healthcare; from employment to policing; from education to rates of incarceration; from environmental safety to possession of wealth; from equal access to social space to equitable positive representation in the media—racial/ ethnic minorities in the United States are enormously disadvantaged, for no other reason than their race/ethnicity.[4]

An enlightened Court, on the other hand, would have accepted the view articulated by Justice Sonya Sotomayor (with whom Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg concurred) in a dissenting opinion in another Supreme Court case, Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, 572 U.S. ___ (2014), that further advanced the racist agenda of the conservatives on the Court to turn back the gains of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s by, in this instance, outlawing affirmative action policies: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.” She continues: “As members of the judiciary tasked with intervening to carry out the guarantee of equal protection, we ought not sit back and wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society. It is this view that works harm, by perpetuating the facile notion that what makes race matter is acknowledging the simple truth that race does matter.” 

(Text continues below, however, you must also study the images--you know the deal.)

As already indicated, institutional racism may also be referred to as “colorblind racism” where the idea is to claim that by not “seeing” race you undermine racism--the view held by people like Chief Justice Roberts, Jr. (and his allies on the Supreme Court, such as Samuel Anthony Alito Jr., Clarence Thomas, and others).[5] But as explained above, this view assumes that we no longer live in a racist society and therefore no remedies are needed to deal with this deeply insidious form of social injustice. In other words, the notion of "colorblindness," is, in actuality, a form of racism. However, it should also be noted that the concept of colorblindness from the perspective of race also has a different and, in fact, a positive meaning when used as originally intended when it was first invoked in the form of a “colorblind constitution” by Justice John Marshall Harlan in his dissenting opinion in that infamous 1896 case, Plessy v. Ferguson, that legitimated Jim Crow racism by establishing the patently bogus doctrine of “separate but equal” in direct violation of the intent of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. In that case, Justice Harlan attempted to remind his colleagues that the U.S. Constitution was colorblind in the sense that it could not be used to justify racist practices, such as Jim Crow segregation.

When conservatives hark back to the Harlan dissent they are deliberately, cunningly, and perfidiously misreading the intent of that dissent. Here is part of Justice Harlan’s dissent:

But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law... The present decision, it may well be apprehended, will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments of the constitution, by one of which the blacks of this country were made citizens of the United States and of the states in which they respectively reside, and whose privileges and immunities, as citizens, the states are forbidden to abridge.

(e) Juridical Racism

Juridical racism, in the U.S., is closely linked to dominative racism because it was racism that was instituted through law in order to exploit African Americans and other minorities directly. The slave codes and the Jim Crow laws are classic examples of laws that established a juridical racist society in the South.    

(f) Ethnicism (ethnocentrism)

From our perspective, ethnicism (or ethnocentrism) is to be understood as interchangeable with racism in terms of its societal functions and in relation to oppression. However, ethnicism is not, obviously, racism in terms of its source. The difference being that ethnicism is based on ethnicity which refers to cultural divisions within a racial group based on class, language, religion, caste, etc. or culture in general. In other words, what we have here is people of the same race engaged in “racist” type oppression, largely for the same reasons. To take an example from United States, Islamophobia within the Black community (involving discrimination against black Muslims) is one example of ethnicism at work. When one turns attention to places like Africa and Asia it gets even more serious. Ethnicism involving the Japanese against the Chinese, or against the Koreans is tragically legendary. Another example is the ethnicist conflict between the Israeli Jews and the Palestinians. 

(Text continues below, however, you must also study the images--you know the deal.)

(g) Neo-racism (Cultural Racism)

Simply put, neo-racism (also referred to as cultural racism) is, in reality, racism pretending to be ethnocentrism. A good example of how this works is when people of a different color who also happen to have a different culture are discriminated against on the basis, allegedly, of culture (and not color). A good example of this phenomenon at work is the racist treatment of immigrants in Europe who come from different cultural backgrounds but who are also people of a different color (e.g., Africans, Arabs, Asians, etc.). Often the line that is put forward is that if the immigrants would assimilate into the host culture--the key word here is assimilate--they would not be targets of discrimination because the racists claim that race is not an issue, just culture. Yet, descendants of racialized immigrants, who are several generations removed from their ancestors, who have fully assimilated still face racial discrimination. The very idea of a "Black German" or a Black Frenchman" or a "Black Englishman" remains, in the minds of most whites (racists or not), a preposterous idea--assimilation be damned. This is true in the U.S., as well. Cultural assimilation is not an issue for, say African Americans and Native Americans, yet they are still targets of racial discrimination today by the descendants of the white colonists. Consider, to go back to Europe, during the Nazi era, no amount of assimilation by the European Jews spared them from the Holocaust. To put it bluntly, neo-racism is a myth; it's just racism.[6] 

(II) Non-Structural Racism

(a) Internalized Racism

Internalized racism (like, for example, its counterpart, internalized sexism) refers to a phenomenon where, paradoxically, a section of the racially oppressed, either willfully, or because of ignorance, cooperate with the maintenance of institutionalized racism (or sexism). A good example of such a group, among people of color in United States, are those who espouse political and/or social conservatism. Persons who make up this group, e.g. the black bourgeoisie or the Latino bourgeoisie, like their fellow white conservatives, generally do not accept that, today, there is still such a thing as institutionalized racism. In their view, institutionalized racism is a thing of the past. Therefore, current manifestations of racially-determined oppression in people's lives (such as iniquitous income distribution, or a racially-biased justice system, or residential segregation of such magnitude that it severely limits, in a caste-like fashion, upward mobility for generations of the oppressed) is explained away as manifestations of a lack of personal agency on the part of the racially oppressed. In other words, what they are really saying here, if you dig a little deeper, is that all those negative essentialist "coon" stereotypes that were universalized by blackface minstrelsy and films like the so-called Birth of a Nation (1915, directed by D. W. Griffith) that had their roots in white southern anti-black racist culture are still valid today in one form or another. What kind of stereotypes? Lazy, unambitious, always looking out for free handouts, intellectually deficient, prone to criminality, unimaginative, oversexed, undisciplined, dishonest, and so on.

It should be pointed out that Black bourgeois conservatism in a racialized country is not a symptom of liberation and progress; rather it is a symptom of the very intractability of racism. The black bourgeoisie, like its white counterpart, is unable to distinguish between the permanence of institutional racism (“colorblind racism”) with the sometimes episodic nature of interpersonal racism in a context of class differentiation—rooted, ironically, in affirmative action—and, in United States, the tangible dividends that are thought to accrue from playing the role of the black equivalent of the Asian American “model minority.”

Not surprisingly, in its ignorance, the black bourgeoisie fanatically adheres to the concept of colorblind racism. And as if this is not enough, the black bourgeoisie’s generally legitimate critique of the hypocrisy of many white liberals blinds it not only to the presence of “John Browns” among progressive whites, but to the very serious dangers for black people as a whole—not to mention other people of color—of building an alliance with the ideological descendants of the slaveholders of yesteryear.[7]  

(b) Homogamous Racism

Internalized racism can also refer to racist discrimination among different races/ ethnicities but who all are victimized by the dominant form of racism. This form of racism may be referred to as homogamous racism/ethnicism. In United States, for example, racist prejudice and/or discrimination between these groups is not unusual: African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, LatinX Americans, and so on. Yet, all these groups are victimized by the dominant whiteness-based racism (albeit to varying degrees of course).

In other words, homogamous racism/ ethnicism refers to racism/ethnicism among those who themselves are all targets of racism/ ethnicism as the racial/ ethnic subordinate group, from the broader racist/ ethnicist superordinate group in a society. It is a product of a racially/ethnically determined powerlessness of historically long duration among the subordinate groups, relative to the superordinate group in the broader society, in which racist/ethnicist discriminatory resentment and opportunistic behavioral practice becomes endemic among the subordinate groups themselves. For example, in Western countries (such as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom, and USA) where people of endogamous (“both-parent”) European ancestry are the super-ordinate group, viewed from the perspective of power relations (political, economic, and social), the subordinate groups (such as those of African, aboriginal, Asian, and Latina/Latino ancestry) will displace their powerlessness on to themselves by engaging in homogamous racism/ethnicism. Here are some concrete binary examples of homogamous racism/ethnicism that work in both directions: Cubans versus Mexicans; African Americans versus Asians or Latina/Latinos; Light-skinned Latina/Latinos versus dark-skinned Latina/Latinos; Aboriginal Americans (misnamed “Indians” by Christopher Columbus) versus African Americans; North Africans versus Asians; Afro-Caribbeans versus Asians; Asians versus Aboriginal Australians; and so on; and so on; and so on.   

(Text continues below, however, you must also study the images--you know the deal)

Identity Politics

It goes without saying that, first, each of these groups are opposed to racism/ ethnicism from the superordinate group, but only when it applies to their own group (hypocrisy). Second, this kind of internal division among the

Just because you are one of the oppressed does not mean that you will understand the mechanism of your oppression. These people confuse “institutional racism” with “interpersonal racism.”

subordinate groups—which is often accompanied by what is commonly referred to as “identity politics”—but one that is of the toxic kind (at the very least, often taking the form of aversive racism/ethnicism)—benefits the superordinate group because it keeps the subordinate groups politically and economically weak. In fact, homogamous racism/ ethnicism may run so deep that subordinate groups may align themselves with the superordinate group to keep their fellow subordinate groups in check. Note: Homogamous racism/ethnicism in capitalist societies is paralleled by displaced classstruggle, as indicated, for example, by racial/ethnic divisions among the working classes in their class struggles against the bourgeoisie (also known as the ruling elites, or the capitalist classes). Here is a concrete example: the racism of the white working class prevents it from allying itself with the African American working class in their struggles against the capitalist class for a more equitable and just society (authentic democracy).

Needless to say, homogamous racism is characterized by considerable hypocrisy. Homogamous racists/ethnicists are virulently opposed to all forms of racism and ethnicism, but only when it applies to their own group.  

(Text continues below, however, you must also study the images--you know the deal.)

(c) Internalized Sub-Racism

This form of racism is exemplified by the dislike of and conscious discrimination against people of one’s own race/ethnicity. In other words, it is a form of self-hatred that emerges as a consequence of a lack of political consciousness in the context of a pervasively racist/ ethnicist society. A common example of internalized racism in United States is the deliberate refusal by parents to teach their own mother tongue or cultural practices to their second generation immigrant children. Another common example is discrimination against people of one’s own race/ethnicity who are recent immigrants (sometimes pejoratively referred to as “fresh off the boat”). Yet, another example is what is sometimes referred to as "colorism" where some among black (and brown) peoples show deliberate bias against those who are darker skinned within their own race/ethnicities.

Internalized sub-racism allows people who practice this form of racism to delude themselves into believing that they themselves will be spared racist discrimination by the wider (white) society if they will distance themselves from people of their own race by means of, for example, cultural markers, such as language, skin color, etc. It’s a delusion because white racists do not make a distinction between recent immigrants and those who have been in the country for generations when they discriminate against a particular group—it is skin color that matters, not language and culture.

(Text continues below, however, you must also study the images--you know the deal.)

(d) Interpersonal (individualized) Racism

This form of racism refers to the quotidian racism found in interpersonal encounters between specific individuals that is not legitimated by the relevant institutional culture and which, most ironically, can include racist behavior on the part of individuals who themselves may be victims of institutional racism. In other words, at the individual level, racism comes in all shapes and colors. Needless to say, this form of racism is an antithesis to interpersonal democracy. (See democracy.)

(e) Backslide Racism

This is racism that resurfaces or rebounds after much progress has been made in eliminating racism (racism can never be completely eliminated, given the functions it performs in society, though, in contrast, one can more or less completely eliminate ethnicism [8]). A good example of backslide racism is when Chinese Americans become racial targets once more because of the COVID pandemic where the accusation was that their original homeland (China) had produced the global pandemic.

(f) Xenophobia 

A symptom of the downward spiral of democracy in post-apartheid South Africa that Nelson Mandela, the first Black president of South Africa, had so promisingly stated would be a “rainbow nation” when he became president in 1994, has been the upsurge of horrendously chilling politics of anti-immigrationism taking the form of xenophobia,  involving endemic “lynchings” of African immigrants (legal or illegal)—from African countries as diverse as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Nigeria, Somalia, and Zimbabwe—in blood-soaked mind-numbing orgies of public violence, often tolerated by local authorities, as well as their periodic mass arrests and expulsion, and of course relentless quotidian harassment. This is a circumstance that, as history has proven time and again across the planet, lends truth to the assertion that victimization by oppression, in itself, does not make one a morally superior person. In other words, centuries of apartheid oppression appears to have done little to make the masses democratically inclusive-minded with respect to immigrants; even if they share their skin color, and even if South Africa has a long history from colonial times of recruiting foreign migrant labor from the South African border lands. In United States, xenophobia is manifest via aversive xenophobic relations between African Americans and Black immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, etc. 

But what exactly is xenophobia? The difference between xenophobia, and, say, racism, or even ethnicism, is that xenophobia refers to the fear and hatred of outsiders but minus a key element of racism, essentialism, which is responsible for the fallacy of racial hierarchies. Note, however, that xenophobia can perform the same political functions as those of institutionalized ethnicism/racism. Can a person be a racist and a xenophobe? The answer is yes, and the answer is also yes to the reverse: Can a person be a racist without being a xenophobe? 

(Text continues below, however, you must also study the images--you know the deal.)