racism n. Quick reference
A Dictionary of Psychology (4 ed.)
... n . A belief that races ( 2 ) are inherently different from one another and that people's characteristics and capacities are determined largely by race, usually accompanied by a belief in the intrinsic superiority of one particular race over another or others. Also called racialism , but distinguished from it in careful usage. See also authoritarianism , modern racism , stereotype . Compare ableism , ageism , ethnocentrism , fattism , heterosexism , sexism , speciesism . racist n . 1. A person with opinions or attitudes that are...
racism Quick reference
World Encyclopedia
... Doctrine advocating the superiority of one human race . Racism has been the policy of certain regimes that, as a result, sanctioned slavery and discriminatory practices, such as anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany and apartheid in South Africa. In 1967 , UNESCO defined racism as ‘anti-social beliefs and acts which are based on a fallacy that discriminatory inter-group relations are justifiable on biological...
racism Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (2 ed.)
... . Although the roots of theoretical racism can be traced back at least to the fifteenth century, the term did not come to prominence until the 1930s when it was used to describe the pseudo-scientific theory that ‘race’, as a decisive biological determinant, established a hierarchy among different ethnic groups. Racist theories were largely developed after the fact to justify practical racism, which can exist independently of them. Polygenesis, the attempt to explain the differences among kinds by positing diverse origins, provided a basis for maintaining...
racism Quick reference
A Dictionary of Human Geography
... A set of social relations that is used to discriminate against people based on their assumed race . Given their political power, wealth, and historical precedent, racism is usually expressed as discrimination by white populations against ‘non-white’ people. Racism can be both overt, explicitly expressed through discourse and law, and materially through forms of violence, and covert in nature, working in more implicit and subtle ways to disenfranchise people through the restriction of life opportunities. Racism was initially based on the notion that there...
racism Reference library
Dictionary of the Social Sciences
... A form of prejudice based on the belief that certain racial groups are inherently superior to others. Racist discourse generally attributes such characteristics to biology, although cultural and historical arguments may also come into play. Such prejudice has in many cases grounded broader social and legal forms of discrimination, such as slavery and, later, segregation in the United States. Racism has been the subject of extensive research in the social sciences, from studies of its impact on the psychology of its victims to quantitative research on the...
racism Quick reference
A Dictionary of Media and Communication (3 ed.)
... Prejudiced attitudes , ideologies , practices, or policies based on an irrational belief in the inherent inferiority of those seen as belonging to other ‘ races ’ ( see also ethnocentrism ; Eurocentrism ). It involves ‘ othering ’ in terms of specific negative stereotypes of racial difference , as well as the exnomination of the definers. It reflects ignorance, dislike, hatred, or fear, and serves to privilege one group while justifying the exclusion, subordination, or exploitation of others. Racism is not a monolithic and unchanging phenomenon...
racism Reference library
The Oxford Companion to the Body
... According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the term describes ‘the theory that distinctive human characteristics and abilities are determined by race’. The word itself is rather recent, probably going back only to the 1930s. There are two attitudes towards the concept of racism: one says that ‘racism’ is usefully applied only where it is derived from a perception of race and the ensuing fixation on ‘typical’ racial traits. In this sense ‘racism’ describes the racialist attitudes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, deriving from the merger of...
Racism Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States
...frameworks of western culture. Isolating and alienating people, racism produces much of the societal violence directed at individuals and groups. At the end of the twentieth century the persistence of racism has created what Andrew Hacker calls Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal ( 1992 ). Derrick Bell asserts, in Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism ( 1992 ), that “racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society.” Racism affects all Americans, but some groups and individuals suffer...
racism Quick reference
A Dictionary of Sports Studies
... The process whereby people's social relations are determined by the attribution of particular biological and/or cultural characteristics, with the consequence that social groups are differentiated according to those attributions. Racism generates claims that such differentiated groups have a natural or unchanging character, and perpetuates discriminatory and prejudiced beliefs and practices. Ben Carrington and Ian McDonald , in their edited volume ‘Race’, Sport and British Society ( 2001 ), state that the ‘discourse of racism’ has shifted since the...
racism Quick reference
A Dictionary of Social Work and Social Care (2 ed.)
... Values, beliefs, ideologies, or behaviour that distinguish people’s characteristics and abilities and justify discrimination against them on the basis of their ‘membership’ of a ‘racial’ group, most often on the basis of skin colour, but also can be on the basis of their country of origin or their culture . Racism has often resulted in vicious treatment of people; asserting extreme and unalterable differences between ‘races’ allows the dominant group to think of the subordinated group as ‘not like us’ and not fully human. Until the 1990s, racism was...
racism Quick reference
A Dictionary of Journalism
...racism A belief in the superiority of one race , prejudicial attitudes towards people of other races, and/or actions that have the effect of disadvantaging one or more racial groups. Much of the mainstream media has long been accused of racism and stereotyping in the way that people from some ethnic minority communities are—or are not—covered; however, much journalism has also challenged and exposed racist attitudes and policies. Material likely to encourage hatred on racial grounds is contrary to most journalists’ codes of conduct , and the most blatant...
Racism Reference library
Sterling Stuckey
The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Social History
...on the State of Virginia ( 1785 ), Jefferson revealed racist notions, portraying African Americans as subhuman and idealizing Indians. White racism so pervaded antebellum America that the free black leader Martin Delany argued that only when blacks gained political power would it diminish. Southern religious leaders offered biblical defenses of racism, and by the 1850 s an elaborate pseudoscientific racism, based largely on measurements of cranial capacity, was devised by the so-called American school of anthropology, which included the distinguished...
Racism Reference library
Sterling Stuckey
The Oxford Companion to United States History
...the State of Virginia ( 1785 ), Jefferson revealed racist notions, portraying African Americans as subhuman while idealizing Indians. White racism so pervaded antebellum America that the free black leader Martin Delany ( 1812–1885 ) argued only that when blacks gained political power would it diminish. Southern religious leaders offered biblical defenses of racism and by the 1850s, an elaborate pseudo-scientific racism, based largely on measurements of cranial capacity, was devised by the so-called American School of Anthropology, which included the...
Racism Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Black British History
... . Racism is a long‐standing feature of human societies, but it has taken many different forms and been interpreted in many different ways in the course of history. 1. Theorizing race and racism 2. Early British racisms 3. Colonialism and domestic racism in the colonial era 4. Racializing non‐whiteness 5. The situation at the start of the 21st century 1. Theorizing race and racism Theories of the origins and nature of ‘race’ and racism abound, as do theories of how racism may be remedied. An inherent difficulty lies within the very definitions of...
racism Quick reference
The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (3 ed.)
... The inability or refusal to recognize the rights, needs, dignity, or value of people of particular races or geographical origins. More widely, the devaluation of various traits of character or intelligence as ‘typical’ of particular peoples. The category of race may itself be challenged, as implying an inference from trivial superficial differences of appearance to allegedly significant underlying differences of nature; increasingly evolutionary evidence suggests that the dispersal of one original people into different geographical locations is a...
racism Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (2 ed.)
...racism During the 1970s the charge of racism began to be levelled against a number of well-known children’s books, chiefly (in Britain) by members of such radical groups as the Children’s Rights Workshop and the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative. The latter group published Racism and Sexism in Children’s Books, edited by Judith Stinton ( 1976 , revised and enlarged, 1979 ), which contained attacks on the portrayal of black characters in such books as Uncle Tom’s Cabin , The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , Little Black Sambo , the Doctor...
Racism Reference library
Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619–1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
... Prior to the 1830s, in both the North and the South, the inferiority of black Americans was generally accepted as a given, a tacit assumption that was not strongly challenged. However, the development of immediate abolitionism after 1830 compelled the South in particular to articulate its racism more than it had done before. Rather than presuming white superiority, southerners had to prove it, and they had to defend the political and social status quo that supported the extremely institutionalized racism of slavery. As abolitionism escalated, racism...
Racism Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing
... ( 1940 ) to the minorities they encounter is often blunt and crude. Nevertheless, such responses may speak less of the authors' racism than of their efforts to create characters who reflect a gritty reality. As the twentieth century advanced, mystery writers began not only to reflect society's racism but to dissect it. Contemporary writers seem to be more sensitive than their predecessors to not only glaring acts of racism but to more subtle examples. In Bootlegger's Daughter ( 1992 ), Margaret Maron has her liberal characters observe and comment on...
Racism Reference library
Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World
...Consequently, an important component in understanding “racism” in the modern world is that it is inevitably associated with power. The identification and separation of peoples according to race has a long history, but the emergence of scientific racism in the nineteenth century heralded a new and particularly virulent chapter in the history of racism. First formulated in Europe, various medical, anthropological, and philosophical theories of the day greatly influenced the development of scientific racism. Proponents of a theory of difference based on...
Racism Reference library
D. Ryan Gray
The Oxford Companion To Archaeology (2 ed.)
...of racialization, and the creation of racial identities. Much of this work is explicitly meant to challenge contemporary racism, and this might be appropriate, as the discipline of archaeology itself has a troubled past with the issue of race, one that is still being rectified in the present. Archaeology and Scientific Racism. Racial ideologies formed a backdrop for the origins of archaeology, as played out in the “scientific racism” of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The fundamental tenet of this movement was that humans could be classified...
