RACISM: HISTORY, CAUSES, CHARACTERISTICS AND CONSEQUENCES - HISTORY - 2025

The racism is the act in which a person discriminates against another person by their skin color and all the morphological features to be linked. These characteristics associated with morphology can be as simple as the shape of the nose, height, the shape of the head and even the color of the eyes.

Racism also tends to link the criteria of race with that of ethnicity and nationality, which is why it is often accompanied by xenophobia and nationalist chauvinism.

There is ample historiographical documentation in which it can be demonstrated that racism is very old, making it one of the oldest forms of discrimination that exist.

The justifications that racists have had have been due to motivations that focus on ethnocentric, ideological, pseudoscientific, religious and folkloric criteria. The sum of all these causes makes up the structure of racist discourse, as well as its arguments and allegations.

Of the characteristics present in racism, the one that stands out the most is the absolute dislike for a specific race that is seen as harmful or alien to the interests of the discriminator.

There is, of course, a component of prejudice and cognitive biases in which the racist assures that he is in a superior position and that, therefore, he has the right to subdue or eliminate inferior races. These precepts, at the time, received a strong reception and left unfortunate consequences.

Brief historical overview of racism

Discrimination of one human being by another is not new; On the contrary, it is very old, and for different reasons.

There is abundant evidence that anti-Semitism was common in the Assyrians in ancient times, that the Egyptians subjugated the ethnic groups of Sub-Saharan Africa and that even Aristotle himself justified slavery, xenophobia and machismo in his Politics. It is also known that in the Middle Ages there were hatreds of this type.

However, contempt for a different racial group, as it is known today, did not acquire its final form until the Age of Discovery, that is, from the 16th century.

By that time, it was believed that Indians and blacks were not only not people, but even below animals. For this basic reason, they were subjected to slavery during European colonization, which survived in later years as a racially segregated regime.

Racism was more serious in some countries than in others. This was witnessed by Alexander von Humboldt when on his trip to Cuba he found that blacks were better treated in the viceroyalties of the Spanish Crown than in the English, French and Dutch colonies, and even in the United States.

However, Humboldt stressed that there was no good discrimination and that slavery should be abolished and eradicated after all.

In this way, racism served for centuries as a tool to promote a social division that was structured by castes. The dominant group was often the white race, at least as far as racial discrimination perpetrated in the Western world is concerned.

In other latitudes, similar parameters were followed in which the dominated was an inferior being or, failing that, a second-class citizen who did not have access to the rights of citizens.

It is not until the 19th and 20th centuries that racism reaches its final consequences. In these centuries the extremes of genocide or apartheid systems were touched, in which blacks were free citizens, but with nonexistent or very limited legal guarantees.

The struggles against them resulted in their abolition and the establishment of a new order in which freedom, respect and equality among men were implanted.

Causes

Ethnocentric

Racial discrimination due to ethnocentrism is based on the premise that men who are not in the “us” ethnic group belong to the “them” ethnic group, mainly if their lineage is doubtful or is mixed with other races.

For example, in Spanish America, peninsular whites called Creole whites and shore whites those whites who, having European descent, had been born in America and who had a lower social position than those born in the Old Continent.

Ideological

It is based on ideological precepts raised with philosophy. For example, during German fascism, Alfred Rosenberg, considered Hitler's thinker, wrote a treatise in which he claimed that the "Aryan race" was superior to the Jewish.

On the opposite side of the globe, Watsuji Tetsuro argued in his book Fudo that Japan's natural environment had unique features, which is why the Japanese were special beings with qualities that neither Chinese nor Korean had.

Pseudoscientific

It came to be called "scientific racism" when it was in vogue between the 19th and 20th centuries. He used pseudosciences such as phrenology to distort concepts of evolutionary biology, in order to build models of thought that promoted eugenics and "racial cleansing."

Only whites were thought to have the right to supremacy and supposedly "scientific" evidence was available to support this point of view.

None of the postulates of "scientific racism" is true and is therefore without foundation. There is no evidence to support them. Therefore, this concept is discarded and superseded, without any validity in current science.

Religious

Here religious criteria are used to cement racism. Alfred Rosenberg, mentioned above, suggested that all facets of Judaism or Semitic racial aspects should be erased from Christianity, since Jesus Christ was Aryan, German, and therefore European.

Mormonism is not far behind, either. In his sacred book, it is stated that God stipulates that good men are white, while bad men are black, who are the fruit of divine punishment.

Folkloric

This cause is rare, but it exists and there is evidence of it. It focuses, then, on the racism that uses popular culture.

This happens a lot with the ethnic group of the Dogon in Mali, who by oral tradition fervently believe that a child born white is a manifestation of evil spirits, and therefore must die. If he lives, he is the object of derision among his people, without knowing that such whiteness is due to a genetic condition called albinism.

characteristics

Based on the above, it can be said that racism meets these four essential characteristics:

Prejudiced attitude

The hated racial group is by definition bad without giving concrete and demonstrable reasons why. It is simply assumed that there are "superior" and "inferior" races, accepting no explanations other than those given by a given doctrine.

Aggressive behavior

Verbal, psychological or physical violence is used against the racially discriminated group. There may be harassment and abuse.

Fixation by race

Regardless of their religious creed or political militancy, the "inferior" race is so because of their physical features related to their skin color. For a white supremacist, a black person is an inferior being regardless of whether he is a Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Republican, or Democratic.

Hate speech

The messages of racism are charged with a strong contempt for discriminated races, who are taught to hate, belittle and, where possible, eliminate. These ideas are intended to influence public policy, law, and the school system.

Consequences

Racism has had pernicious effects that have been seen throughout history. Among the most dangerous are:

Genocides

"Racial cleansing" has been perpetrated in massacres such as those in the Holocaust, the Nanking Massacre and the Rwandan Genocide.

Apartheid

An example is South Africa, where blacks were denied their full freedoms. In the United States there was a very similar regime in which there could not even be interracial marriages.

Slavery

Very common practice during the time of European colonization and that lasted well into the 19th century.

Division and social inequality

The most practical example is in the caste system imposed by the Spanish Crown in its American dominions, in which the upper castes had better socioeconomic conditions than the lower castes.

Some attempts to end racism

There are also numerous forces that were fully opposed to racism and abuses committed in its name. Many have been the struggles in which the abolition of injustices that were carried out at the institutional level was promoted.

In countries like South Africa, human rights movements achieved notable successes, but not without making substantial sacrifices. The same has happened in North America and India.

The process to disarm racism has been slow, but fruitful. However, it has had to deal with new forms of this scourge. Racism has been disguised with more subtle means that are intermingled with other means of discrimination.

Peoples like Latin Americans have made epic efforts to reduce racism to its bare minimum. In Asia, for its part, this problem has not been sufficiently reported in the world.

References

1. Allen, Theodore (1994). The Invention of the White Race (2 vols.). London: Verse.
2. Barkan, Elazar (1992). The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars. New York: Cambridge University Press.
3. Barker, Chris (2004). The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies. California: SAGE Publications.
4. Daniels, Jessie (1997). White Lies: Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse. New York: Routledge.
5. Ehrenreich, Eric (2007). The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
6. Isaac, Benjamin (1995). The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
7. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1952). Race and History. Paris: UNESCO.
8. Poliakov, Leon (1996). The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalistic Ideas In Europe. New York: Barnes & Noble Books.