Racism

I

Introduction

Racism, doctrine, belief, or assumption that inherited biological differences cause some human subpopulations to be fundamentally different from, or superior to, others. In this sense, racism originated in the mid-19th century, although evidence of racial discrimination can be detected in much earlier historical periods.

By the beginning of the 20th century there were frequent discussions of the “race problem”, meaning the social and political consequences of biological differences between human groups. By the end of the 20th century an equally general view was that the “problem” was not race but racism, meaning both the prevalence of racist doctrine and the practice of racial discrimination. Only a historical account can explain the many senses in which the words “race” and “racism” have been used.

II

Historical Perspective

A

Before Darwin

The word “race” was introduced into European languages around the beginning of the 16th century. It came to be used in the sense of lineage, as in a reference to “the race and stocke of Abraham” in The Book of Martyrs (1563) by John Foxe. To account for the differences between themselves and Africans, Chinese, and others, Europeans turned to the Old Testament in the Bible, which provided genealogies showing how, by descent, people acquired membership of groups. When the morality of the Atlantic slave trade was debated at the end of the 18th century, both the pro- and anti-slavery parties assumed that blacks and whites shared a common humanity. The relative technological backwardness of Africans was attributed to their living in an unhealthy climate and their lacking the kinds of political and social institutions that encouraged economic development. The claim that they were permanently inferior came only later.

Geologists and natural historians were at that time beginning to uncover processes of development in natural forms. Their evidence conflicted with the popular belief that God had created each species separately. Since children resembled their ancestors, it was difficult to explain how the differences between human groups could have appeared within the period of 6,000 years, which was all that seemed to be allowed by the Bible's chronology.

The first version of so-called “scientific racism” was an attempt to solve this problem. According to the doctrine of permanent racial types, the world was divided into a series of natural provinces. Thus, it was only in Australia that kangaroos and other marsupials were found. Likewise, only in that region were there human beings with the distinctive features of Australian Aborigines. The theory held that the Aborigines corresponded to marsupials in being the sort of human beings suited to that environment. For as long as evidence had existed, each province had supported its own types of flora and fauna, including human beings. This doctrine taught that it was futile for human beings to attempt to colonize any region outside their own natural province. Those who advanced this doctrine usually equated “type” with species, maintaining that blacks and whites were separate species within the genus Homo sapiens. More reputable scholars sided with Christian orthodoxy in regarding blacks and whites as separate varieties (subpopulations) within that species.

In the United States, those who defended the institution of black slavery relied primarily upon passages in the Bible that seemed to authorize it. After the American Civil War and the emancipation of slaves, black subordination was reinforced in new ways and more use was made of the doctrine of the inferiority of the black racial type.

III

Racism After Darwin

By showing that development occurred through natural selection, Charles Darwin in his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) started a revolution in the understanding of human variability. Yet his theory inspired a second form of scientific racism, according to which racial prejudice served an evolutionary function. Prejudice was said to keep human groups distinct and enable them to develop special capacities (as in animal breeding). Thus, some groups would be superior to others in performing particular tasks or in particular environments. Some whites saw support for such interpretations in the decline of the indigenous populations in areas of the Pacific colonized by Europeans. In Australia, New Zealand, and the smaller islands it looked as if the indigenous peoples might be dying out. Whites in general neglected evidence of the spread of European diseases (sometimes deliberately spread) and concluded that nature intended the country for their occupation.

A

Social Theory

Only in the 1920s did psychologists start to assemble evidence that racial prejudice was not an inherited characteristic but a form of behaviour learned in the course of socialization.

Every society has its culture, and therefore its own cultural biases. The tendency to make judgements by reference to the values shared in the subject's own ethnic group, as if it were the centre of everything, is known as ethnocentrism. Individuals share their own society's preferences for particular skin colours, and this may be a basis for the less favourable treatment of outsiders. On occasion, a group within a society is singled out for such treatment: the ethnic majority in, for example, Japan avoids contact with the Burakumin, an ethnic minority descended from an occupational caste created in the feudal period who are not physically distinguishable from other Japanese. The European vocabulary of race has been exported to other regions and employed there despite differences in attitudes. The practices of the Hindu caste system and the relations between ethnic groups in some black African societies can be discriminatory in ways that appear racist to outsiders.

Though doctrines of racial superiority have been widely condemned, the concept of race has continued to be used in the English-speaking world as a social construct. Physical differences are used as markers for the delineation of social groups in ways that do not reflect biological inheritance. For example, in the United States a person of partly African genetic inheritance may consider himself or herself, and be considered by others, to be a member of the African-American racial group.