Racism

African American drinking from a source assigned to blacks. Image of the mid-centuryXX..

A demonstration against school integration in 1959.

Racism, according to the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, is based on the exacerbation of the racial sense of an ethnic group that usually motivates discrimination or persecution of another or others with whom it lives. The word "racism" also designates the anthropological doctrine or political ideology based on that sentiment. In accordance with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations December 21, 1965:

"the doctrine of superiority based on racial differentiation is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unfair and dangerous, and [...] nothing in theory or in practice allows to justify, nowhere, racial discrimination".

The first article of the international convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination (1965) defines racism as:

"all distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, lineage or national or ethnic origin, which is aimed at nullifying or impairing the equal recognition, enjoyment or exercise of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other sphere of public life."

Art. 1

There are authors who propose to distinguish between racism in a broad sense and racism in a narrow sense. In the first case, it would be an ethnocentric or "sociocentric" attitude that separates one's own group from the outside group, and that considers that both are made up of hereditary and immutable essences that make others, outsiders, inadmissible and threatening beings. This conception of others would lead to their segregation, discrimination, expulsion or extermination and could be supported by scientific or religious ideas or mere legends or traditional sentiments. It also affirms the intellectual and moral superiority of some races over others, a superiority that is maintained by racial purity and ruined by miscegenation. This type of racism, whose model is the Nazi and Western racism in general, leads to defending the natural right of "superior" races to prevail over "inferior" ones. Racism in the restricted sense is an apparently scientific doctrine that affirms the hereditary biological determination of the intellectual and moral capacities of the individual, and the division of human groups into races, differentiated by physical characteristics associated with the intellectual and moral, hereditary and immutable.

Granting or withholding rights or privileges on the basis of race or refusing to associate with people because of their race is known as racial discrimination.

Racist attitudes, values and systems establish, openly or covertly, a hierarchical order between ethnic or racial groups, used to justify the privileges or advantages enjoyed by the dominant group.

Buraschi and Aguilar (2019) define racism as "a system of domination and inferiorization of one group over another based on the racialization of differences, in which the interpersonal, institutional and cultural dimensions are articulated. It is expressed through a set of ideas, discourses and practices of invisibility, stigmatization, discrimination, exclusion, exploitation, aggression and dispossession”.

To combat racism, in 1965 the United Nations adopted the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and established March 21 as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

History of racism

The Israeli historian Benjamin Isaac has proposed a definition of racism that makes it possible to identify pre-modern forms of it since it is not based on the idea of biological determinism.

An attitude towards individuals and groups that postulates a direct and linear connection between physical and mental qualities and attributes to these individuals and to these groups physical, mental and collective moral traits constant and unalterable by human will because they would be caused by hereditary factors and by external influences, such as climate and geography.

For her part, Philomena Essed in Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory (London, 1991) has proposed the following definition of racism:

Racism must be understood as an ideology, as a structure and as a process where inequalities, inherent in a broad social structure, relate in a given way, with biological and cultural factors attributed to those who perceive themselves as a different “race” or “ethnic” group.

Classical Antiquity

Bust of Aristotle (Roman copy of an original Greek from 325-300 B.C.) “The peoples of Asia are skilled in spirit, but they lack courage, so they are condemned to slavery. But the [genous] lineage of the Greeks does not cease to be free and to have very good political institutions, and to be able to direct the entire humanity if it came to a single polytheia” (Aristoteles, Policy, 1327b).

In 2004, the Israeli historian Benjamin Isaac published the book The invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, which raised a great deal of controversy because in it he stated that, although "racism did not exist in classical antiquity, under the modern form of a biological determinism", "certain characteristic traits of racism are already found in the texts of ancient literature, and the readings that have been made of them in subsequent periods of Western history have conferred on them, in different forms, an influence not to be overlooked." Isaac claimed the existence of "pre-modern racist thinking" among the ancient Greeks and Romans so that the "genealogy" of racism in the West could be "traced" back to " classical antiquity".

Among the "characteristic features of racism [that] are already found in the texts of ancient literature", Isaac has pointed to the environmental determinism widely accepted from the middle of the century V a. C. and that was developed by Aristotle in the following century in his Politics. According to Aristotle, the ideal environment in which the Greeks lived predisposed them to govern the peoples least favored by nature. However, as Maurice Sartre has pointed out, the theories that the Greeks and Romans developed to justify domination over other peoples “never led to policies of extermination or deliberate exclusion. Well on the contrary! The Greeks and the Romans very widely allowed the integration of the "barbarians"".

Isaac has also pointed out as another "proto-racist" feature the myth of the autochthonousness of the polis of Athens, according to which the Athenians occupied the land in which they lived since the beginning of time, so their lineages they were pure. According to Isaac, "this valorization of pure blood maintains an undeniable proximity to modern racism".: "The people who participate in our education are called Greek rather than those who have the same origin as us."

Slave serving in a banquet (academic at the end of the centuryVa. C.)

Historians who oppose Isaac's theses deny that the concept of «race» can be applied to the Greco-Roman world and therefore it is difficult to attribute the origin of racism in the West to classical Antiquity. Paulin Ismard affirms it emphatically: «The thought of otherness among Greek authors has not given rise to the elaboration of racial ideologies. The regular invocation of genos (lineage, or filiation) or ''eugenics'' (good birth) to identify groups and communities has not led to the construction of coherent racial categories». The same affirms Christian Geulen: "You cannot speak of the birth of racism from the spirit of Antiquity." "To see a danger to one's own culture in the very existence of alien cultural communities within the borders of the Empire, was foreign to the self-image of both the Romans and the Greeks."

The latter has also been highlighted by Maurice Sartre who puts the Roman Empire as the "best example" since "it functioned as a formidable integration machine, including populations that had a detestable reputation". «The old-fashioned integration was much more respectful of indigenous cultures than is believed: becoming “Greek” or “Roman” never entailed the abandonment of ancestral traditions». However, Sartre values Benjamin Isaac's book positively since, "revealing this dark side of ancient thought", "it helps to better understand the mechanisms of racist thought through time". Christian Geulen points out the same nuance: that the Greeks and Romans did not build a racist thought or praxis "does not mean that they have to be excluded from the history of racism".

Middle Ages

Map of T in O of the centuryXV. Above Asia (inhabited by the descendants of Sem), down to the left Europe (inhabited by the descendants of Japheth) and down to the right Africa (inhabited by the descendants of Cam).

Christianity contributed a new concept, universalism, until then foreign to Antiquity, considering itself the true religion of all humanity. In this way, the division between Greeks/Romans and "barbarians", typical of Antiquity, was replaced by the differentiation between those who already formed part of the Christian community, the baptized, and "those not yet". Christians" (the pagans). A special group was made up of the Jews since they were the cradle of the Christian religion and therefore they were not persecuted, but only "carried away" that were not tolerated as demonstrated by the pogroms that they suffered, especially from from the XIV century. The unknown regions of the Earth in the imaginary of the medieval West appeared populated by fabulous beings not destined for salvation. "A racist dimension can hardly be perceived in this worldview", Christian Geulen has stated, adding that as regards "medieval political conflicts, one can hardly speak of recognizable racist motives".

On the other hand, in medieval Islam the curse of Ham, suitably reworked, was used to justify the slavery of blacks by pointing them out as the descendants of Ham who, according to the biblical story, had mocked his father Noah when He found him drunk and naked, and a furious Noah had cursed Ham's son, Canaan, to be "to his brothers the slave of slaves." In the Bible nothing was said about the color of Ham's skin (actually it was about justifying the slavery of the Canaanites, the great enemies of Israel), but in the III the church father Origen added to the curse the prejudice of the skin by stating that the sons of Ham were doomed to a degrading life marked by darkness (in a spiritual sense) and he associated the Ethiopians, descendants of the accursed son of Noah, with the blacks. In the High Middle Ages the Ethiopians will be considered the spirit of evil that opposes that of the angel. However, it was the great Arab scholar Al-Tabari who in the X century clearly stated that the curse of Ham had brought the blackening of their skin so that their descendants were the blacks who were sentenced to slavery.

“Blood cleansing” and the caste system in the Spanish American Empire

The statutes of purity of blood were the mechanism of legal discrimination in the Spanish Monarchy (and the Kingdom of Portugal) against the Jewish-conversed minority (which together with the members of the Moorish minority constituted the New Christians). They consisted of requiring the applicant to enter the institutions that adopted him the requirement of descending from "Old Christian", that is, of not having any Jewish, Moorish or Inquisition-condemned ancestors. It caused rejection in certain ecclesiastical sectors due to the fact that they assumed that even baptism did not wash away the sins of individuals, something completely contrary to Christian doctrine. The first cleansing of blood statute was the "Sentence-Statute" approved in 1449 in the city of Toledo. The most important, and which served as a model for subsequent ones, was the one approved in the cathedral of Toledo in 1547 at the proposal of Archbishop Juan Martínez Silíceo and which was ratified by the pope and the king Philip II in 1555. From the statute of Toledo the statutes spread rapidly throughout the peninsula:

The Blood Cleaning Statutes multiplied throughout Spain in a rolling way. Costumes and guilds begin to exclude the converts from their breast. The main religious orders follow the same path: Jerome, Franciscans, Dominicans, military orders and university colleges. In 1541 it had already been established Statute in the cathedrals of Bajadoz, Seville, Jaén, Córdoba, Oviedo, León and Sigüenza. In 1530 it was established in the Chapel of Kings of Toledo Cathedral.

The purity of blood statute of Toledo Cathedral was successively confirmed by Pope Paul III in 1548, by Pope Julius III in 1550, by Pope Paul IV in 1555 and by King Philip II in 1556. This statute remained in force for centuries and was only abolished in 1865.

Executory or Blood Cleaning Process of the Crespo López family (Granada, Palace of the Forgotten). Those who sought access to certain charges had to prove that among their predecessors there had been no one convicted of the Inquisition or who was Jewish or Muslim. If the genealogical evidence presented was not considered sufficient, a commission was appointed to visit the localities where it could obtain information and take affidavits to witnesses about the applicant's ascendants. The process could last years and bribes and perjury were frequent to prove that it was “old Christian”.

The statutes of purity of blood were based on "the idea that the fluids of the body, and especially the blood, transmitted from the father and the mother to the children a certain number of moral qualities" and that " the Jews, as a people, were incapable of change, despite their conversion". Christians, soon to call themselves "Old Christians," meant the "New Christians," freed at last from the many restrictions they had as Jews before conversion. In addition, "ecclesiastics and magistrates feared the weakening of Roman Catholic orthodoxy" that the entry into the Christian community of these new members could mean.

It remains the subject of debate whether Iberian blood purity statutes are the origin of modern European racism. According to Jean-Fréderic Schaub "the contribution of Iberian blood purity statutes to the formation of racial categories it is located at the junction point between personal exclusion and collective stigmatization". and "blood" as a marginalization strategy. Moralists like Torrejoncillo do not hesitate to affirm [in Sentinel against Jews] that Judaism is defined based on "blood," regardless of whether the conversion to Christianity took place twenty-one years ago. generations".

Painting of castes of the centuryXVIII which represents the sixteen castes of Spanish America.

Limpia de sangre statutes were also established in the Spanish Empire in America as an instrument to ensure the social pre-eminence of the «peninsulares» (the European-born colonizers, also called «gachupines» or «chapetones») and of the "criollos" (the colonizers born in America of Hispanic descent). In this case it was a matter of demonstrating that there was no Indian or African ancestry. And this was especially relevant in a colonial society that was increasingly ethnically mixed, to the point of being structured according to a caste system determined by skin color ―what has been described as a "pigmentocracy"―.

As the British Hispanist John Elliott has pointed out, «in Spanish America, clean blood became a mechanism for the maintenance of control by the ruling elite. The accusation of mixed blood, which carried the stigma of illegitimacy (aggravated by that of slavery when there was also African descent), could be used to justify a segregationist policy that excluded castes from public office, from entry into municipal corporations and religious orders to enrollment in colleges and universities, as well as membership in many guilds and confraternities." Thus, Elliott concludes, "Spanish colonial America developed into a color-coded society."

The Puerto Rican sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel maintains, for his part, that racism appears with the European conquest of America from 1492 and that it is a constitutive process of the phenomenon of «coloniality»:

Coloniality refers to a pattern of power that opens with the European colonial expansion from 1492 and where the idea of race and the global ethno-racial hierarchy goes through all existing social relations such as sexuality, gender, knowledge, class, international division of labour, epistemology, spirituality, etc. and which remains in force even though the colonial administrations were almost eradicated from the planet.

The invention of a racial system (17th and 18th centuries)

In the "Age of Discovery" scholars strove to bring order to as much ethnic and cultural diversity as European colonizers and explorers were encountering, and thus the modern concept of "race" based on phenotypic characteristics was constructed. The religious were the ones who “began to describe and classify the peoples and cultures of the earth in relation to their physical and moral characteristics; thus the variety of God's creation and the harmonious order of it would stand out ». They were followed by scholars, naturalists, philosophers, and physicians who at first strove to follow Church doctrine but soon came into conflict with "creationist doctrine". The pioneer in coining the term "race" in the modern sense was the French François Bernier in 1685.

Swedish naturalist Linnaeus in 1737.

The definitive break with the «creationist doctrine» occurred in the 18th century when man lost his privileged position, that according to the Bible God had granted him, and he was placed within the animal kingdom. In 1758 the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus in the second edition of his Systema naturae placed man in the class of mammals and the order of primates and divided the genus Homo into two species: Homo sapiens and Homo troglodytes (in which it includes orangutans). Homo sapiens had four varieties (races) determined by skin color: black (niger), white (albus), red (rufus) and yellow (luridus) and each of them inhabited a different continent (Africa, Europe, America and Asia, respectively) and was characterized by one of the « four temperaments" (the Asian, melancholic; the American, choleric; the European, sanguine; and the African, phlegmatic). Thus, "Linnaeus's classification unites physical, moral and cultural characteristics".

«The questioning of the privileged status of man within nature is also accompanied by the historicization and temporalization of human societies and of nature itself. Science of man and science of society are built in parallel in the Age of Enlightenment. From Voltaire to Adam Smith, the authors design a universal trajectory from the savage state to civil society, in the course of which peoples pass from an almost animal condition to full humanity.[...] It is therefore man's ability to transform nature, which defines the stages of savagery, barbarism and civilization". higher stage, "civilization", while the rest are "still" in the lower stages of "barbarism" or "savagery". Thus, "white Europeans were presented as the race that surpassed to all the others from the aesthetic and moral point of view".

The German philosopher Kant affirmed the existence of «four races» (following Linnaeus, he called them «white», «yellow», «black» and «red») and established a hierarchy between them: «Humanity exists in its greatest perfection in the white race. The yellow Hindus possess a smaller amount of talent. Blacks are inferior and in the background are a part of the American peoples. Of the "blacks" he said that they could only develop a "culture of slaves", while the "whites" were the only ones with the necessary talents for the "culture of civilization".

The division of humanity into races that were in "lower" stages of historical evolution served to "justify" the enslavement of millions of black Africans brought to America through the Atlantic trade. "In all, slavery and the slave trade represented the first form of racism already fully defined in the European Modern Age." But it "became necessary to explain why human beings had been turned into merchandise. In this actual degradation of Africans turning them into beasts of burden was the true historical origin of why they were later placed on the lower rung of the racial hierarchy", as Kant did, for example.

Scientific racism

Count Arthur de Gobineau, considered the founder of modern racism.

Between 1853 and 1855, Count Arthur de Gobineau published Essai sur l'inegalité de races humaines ('Essay on the inequality of human races') in which he argued that civilizations end declining due to the "racial degeneration" that inexorably occurs during its development as a result of racial mixing (only "racial purity" would have prevented the decline, but the very dynamics of civilizations made it impossible to maintain it).

“Gobineau considers himself in fact one of the most important founders of modern racism… Since the second half of the XIX century Until the first of the 20th century, almost no racist ideology or praxis ―whether in colonial, anti-Semitic or totalitarian contexts― ceased to exist. be in line with Gobineau's theoretical rationalization". However, the myth of the superiority of the Aryan race, the basis of antisemitism, was not the work of Gobineau but of Ernest Renan, "the true founder of academic antisemitism in France, a non-political, strictly speculative anti-Semitism, which does not call for persecution... It is Jules Soury who makes the move to action".

Another pillar of "scientific racism" was polygenism developed by the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz. The polygenists were opposed to monogenism since they argued that each human race had a different origin. Thus, according to them, the existence of "superior" and "inferior" races was demonstrated. On the other hand, Agassiz tried to make polygenism compatible with the Bible, for which he affirmed that Adam's story only referred to the "Caucasian race". It is no coincidence that polygenism was adopted by American anthropologists who defended the slave system of the Southern States.

Frenology. Lamine of the centuryXIX which shows the measurement of Camper's "facialangle" in two apes and two humans. Unlike its creator, the Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper, his successors saw in this measurement an indicator of the degree of evolution of the races on whose lower scale they placed the Africans for having the "face angle of Camper" next to the apes.

A third pillar of “scientific” racism was anthropometry. It had appeared at the end of the 18th century with the work of Christoph Meiners and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach ―pioneers in craniometry―, but Its main promoter at the international level in the following century was the American Samuel Morton. Morton's purpose was to prove that a hierarchy of races could be established "objectively" based on brain size - measuring cranial capacity. In Observations on the Size of the Brain in Various Races ('Observations on the size of the brain in the different races', 1849) he divided humanity hierarchically into six great "races": "modern Caucasian", «Old Caucasian», «Mongolian», «Malay», «American» and, finally, «black». «Disclosing the supposed inferior condition of the indigenous, African and Asian allowed legitimizing their conquest and exploitation, without creating paradoxes ethics with the morality of the West", stressed Max Sebastián Hering Torres.

The definitive turnaround in the «scientific» concept of «race» occurred when the idea that nature was not fixed and immutable but rather evolved was imposed. The first step was taken by the French biologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck, but the one who took the definitive step was Charles Darwin (The Origin of Species, 1859). As Christian Geulen has pointed out, for Darwin “the ultimate drive for evolution as a process of change was something the Enlightenment would never have dared to consider: chance. This generates changes continuously, which immediately after are exposed, in turn, to the constant selective pressure that occurs in the daily struggle for existence. Individuals with characteristics with a greater chance of surviving in their environment will have greater possibilities to reproduce and thus also acquire the new characteristics and this is how a new species ends up appearing. The metaphors that Darwin used to explain his theory would be misinterpreted as the survival of the strongest and the adaptation to the environment to survive. "Both theories are false insofar as they overturn chance in Darwin's theory", Christian Geulen has stressed.

Darwin's theory of evolution had an enormous influence on racism. After 1859 the idea of race changed: "from then on it is admitted that humanity has evolved over longer periods of time than previously thought." previously conceived. Thus it becomes untenable, even for a polygenicist, to claim to observe the human races in their original purity." In this way the consensus is reached among anthropologists that "races do not exist except in the transformed and hybrid state". From the misrepresentation and "adaptation" to society of Darwin's theory of evolution, social Darwinism inaugurated by Herbert Spencer arose. Other prominent social Darwinists included Alfred Russel Wallace and Ernst Haeckel. A derivation of social Darwinism was eugenics, a concept coined by the British Francis Galton in 1883 and which Alfred Ploetz and Wilhelm Schallmayer introduced in Germany under the term Rassenhygiene ('racial hygiene';).

Forms of racist praxis in the 19th century

Slavery and racial segregation in the United States

The fugitive slave Gordon in 1863 during his medical examination in a Union camp.

The «clearest form of racist practice» in the 19th century was slavery that continued to exist in the African space and Arabic and in America, both North and South. And this despite the growing rejection that it aroused - the Congress of Vienna in 1815 already declared it illegal - not only because it was contrary to the rights of man but also because of the mixture of races that it implied. In fact, slavery was barely legitimized by scientific racism and its defenders, like the plantation owners in the South of the United States, resorted to other types of arguments, such as paternalism over their black slaves.

The situation changed radically with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 —followed by the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution— through which slaves became free men since it was from then on when they were used the biological and racial "arguments" to "prove" the inferiority of blacks ―in addition to resorting to intimidation and violence through the Ku-Klux-Klan―. At the same time, the first explicit prohibitions on racial mixing and sexual relations between blacks and whites were approved, which were punishable for blacks with heavy penalties. It was in this context that the “one-drop rule” (One-Drop Rule) was established, a “sadly famous rule for the verification of racial belonging that was in force in the courts of the States of the South until the 1970s". According to the One-Drop Rule, a person who carried a single drop of "black blood" was considered black, that is, whoever had only one black ancestor in the last five generations. As Christian Geulen has pointed out, “in this way, any form of racial mixture was declared non-existent, at least legally; there were only genuine whites or blacks. Naturally, an inverse application of the One-Drop-Rule was ruled out in order to know who should legally be considered as a target...".

Anti-Semitism

First page of 1893 of the French anti-Semitic newspaper The free parole, founded by Édouard Drumont, in which a caricature appears on the "Jewish change" of dominating the world ("His homeland", is read at the foot), and in which the Jew is represented by supposed "racial" traits that define and identify him, such as the enormous Eagle nose.

As the 19th century progressed, it was Jews "who became the preferred targets of racist ideologies". The term "anti-Semitism" was born in the German Empire in the years 1870-1880 "to give a name to a vision of the world that saw the foundations of all cultural development in the differentiation and struggle between the "Aryan" and the "Semitic"». Thus, as Christian Geulen has pointed out, “racist anti-Semitism” – as he calls it – “was by no means a simple aversion to Jews. At the end of the 19th century, and not only in Germany, anti-Semitism was a party program and a philosophy of history, a political point of view and a natural and social doctrine; it was an essential means of understanding themselves..."

According to Geulen, the fundamental reason for "racial" hostility towards Jews lay not in traditional Christian anti-Judaism but in the fact that, especially in Germany, they constituted "the only important minority cultural community." «In that status of “established marginals” [«the integration of Jews into European society reached its culminating point in the second half of the century XIX, and especially in Germany»] a good part of the anti-Semitic propaganda was focused on». For the German ultranationalist anti-Semites, "Judaism was not merely the enemy of a so-called German race, but also an enemy of racism as a doctrine and interpretation of the world - and therefore acquired for the anti-Semites more and more the traits of a fundamentally hostile race." —». One of the first to express this new antisemitism was the Berlin historian Heinrich von Treitschke who wrote in 1879: "The Jews are our misfortune." It soon became clear, as the Dreyfus affair demonstrated, that the new antisemitism fueled by racial theories was not just a German phenomenon.

In France, Ernest Renan is considered the true founder of «academic anti-Semitism», but, according to Pierre-André Taguieff, «it is Jules Soury who makes the move to action. He denounces the absolute domination of the Jews over the political apparatus, the institutions, etc. […] The “struggle of the races” is reinterpreted as the main manifestation of the “struggle for existence” in humans. The combat between the "Aryan" and the "Semite" is a fight to the death". The lower echelon was "the Jew", "the Aryan's only dangerous competitor at present", although he is destined to be defeated as incapable of "productive work" and devoid of "political sense" and "military spirit".

The "Golden Age" of Eugenics (1890-1945)

Poster of the 1935 Nazi eugenic exhibition "Wunder des Lebens" ('Milagros de la vida') showing a demographic projection of what would happen (So würde is enden!, 'That would end!') if the "inferiors" (Minderwertige) had twice as many children (4 over 2) as the "superiors" (Höherwertige). This justified Nazi eugenic politics.

Eugenics, a concept coined by the British Francis Galton in 1883 and spread in the German Empire by Alfred Ploetz and Wilhelm Schallmayer under the term Rassenhygiene ('racial hygiene'), experienced its period of peaked between the late 19th century and 1945, "when eugenics was discredited by the crimes of National Socialism". Christian Geulen, with eugenics, "the ancient idea of racial struggle and the central theme of race mixing were completed with a third motif that was to transform racial discourse, as well as the practices that accompanied it, into a totalitarian one: the idea of the artificial creation of the race".

When the First World Eugenics Congress met in London in 1912, the eugenics movement was already widespread, especially in the United States, England, the Scandinavian countries and Germany. Its objective was to favor the reproduction of the desired characteristics ("positive" eugenics) and to avoid the reproduction of the unwanted ones ("negative" eugenics). Ultimately, the eugenic project consisted of "being able to control human evolution". physical and mental, "born criminals", etc.). In what the eugenicists disagreed with each other was whether intervention in the environment should prevail, as the most liberal maintained, or in "biological breeding", as they maintained the most reactionary.

After the terrible tragedy of the Great War of 1914-1918, although some racial theorists began to doubt the effectiveness of eugenic measures and from then on made the possibility of a decline and decline in the center of their concerns own race, supposedly superior ―two works exemplified this new perception: Passing of the Great Race ('The end of the great race') by the American Madison Grant and Der Untergang des Abendlandes ('The decline of the West') by the German Oswald Spengler―, eugenics was not questioned and very radical proposals appeared, such as that of the German jurist Karl Binding and the forensic psychiatrist Alfred Hoche who in a small book published in 1920 advocated for the elimination of people who led a "life unworthy of life" (Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens) ―the incurably ill and mentally retarded― and who constituted a "ballast existence" for the community due to the high cost that It meant taking care of them and the large number of hospital beds they occupied. This would be the policy that the Nazis would apply in the following decade through the secret extermination program called Aktion T4, disguised under the term "euthanasia".

Nazi racism and the Holocaust

The evolution of racist ideology in German culture reached its peak with the National Socialist movement (Nazism), led by Adolf Hitler, which gained the support of a large part of the German population in the 1930s and 1940s, until it collapsed with the defeat of Germany in World War II, in 1945. National Socialism arose as an ideology of superiority of the so-called "white race" and within it the supremacy of a hypothetical "Aryan race", of which the Germans, were considered their purest expression. Nazi racism was directed against people of Jewish origin—"the Jew" was the great threat to the survival of the German nation—and secondarily against other minorities, such as the Gypsy people.

The International Jew (1920), a book by the famous American businessman Henry Ford, was of great influence in the worldwide expansion of anti-Semitism and in Nazi ideology, determining the persecution and murder of the Germans of Jewish origin, and then other ethnic minorities such as the gypsies. This kind of ideas is manifested in the displacement, internment, and, later, the systematic extermination of an estimated number of 11 million to 12 million people. In the midst of World War II, approximately half of those victims are Jews in what is historically remembered as the Holocaust (Shoah). Between 100,000 and 1,000,000 Gypsies were also killed (Porraimos).

Postcolonial Racism: South African Apartheid

Cartel on a Durban beach that says: "Under section 37 of the Laws of the Durban Beach Zone, this bathroom area is reserved for the only use of members of the white race group"(1989)

After the defeat of fascism in World War II, racism lost its power of conviction and its legitimacy, but racist myths and practices survived for a time in the post-colonial world or that was in the process of emancipation. The most extreme example was represented by the South African regime of apartheid that lasted until the 1990s. According to Christian Geulen, “apartheid meant not only the separation of the population into a privileged race and in another that lacked rights in many aspects. In the consciousness of white South Africans it was rather a system they considered necessary for the stability and survival of their own way of life as colonizers in an openly hostile environment." "South Africa was, above all, the last of the post-colonial regions. in which racism and the myth of the race struggle were presented in the classic imperialist form of a conflict between European and non-European cultures”, concludes Geulen.

Apartheid was a regime of racial segregation established in South Africa by Dutch Boer or Afrikaner colonizers, as part of a broader regime of political, economic, social and racial discrimination against the white minority of European origin on the aboriginal black majority, derived in turn from colonialism. The word apartheid in Afrikaner means "segregation".

Apartheid proper began in 1948 with the seizure of power by the National Party. This party decided to implement a racist regime that would consolidate the power of the white minority and prevent the miscegenation of the population. To this end, in 1949, he enacted the Mixed Marriage Prohibition Law No. 55/49, which prohibited the marriages of people considered “white” with people considered “non-white”. The following year the sexual separation of the inhabitants, according to skin tone, was completed with the Immorality Law No. 21 of 1950, which regulated the sexual life of citizens, prohibiting "illegal fornication" and "any act immoral and indecent" between a white person and an African, Indian, or colored person. These rules established what became known as "little apartheid."

In 1955 at a congress held in Kliptown, near Johannesburg, various opposition organizations, including the African National Congress and the Indian Congress, formed a common coalition that adopted the Freedom Proclamation, in order to establish a state no racial discrimination. Anti-racist struggles were severely suppressed by the Boer regime, including mass killings and arrests. Among the black leaders arrested was Nelson Mandela who remained in prison for 27 years (1963-1990).

The United States and Western European countries tolerated apartheid during the 1950s and 1960s, because South Africa had taken an openly anti-communist position, but from the 1970s, the The South African regime began to be rejected by world public opinion and most of the international community, and its support began to be limited to the United States, Israel, and the Ibero-American dictatorships of that time (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, etc.) Finally, in the early 1990s, apartheid would be abolished and in 1994 Nelson Mandela became president of the country.

After 1945: the end of scientific racism; cultural racism

After the atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II became known, the biological notion of "race" was delegitimized, although not completely at first, and with it scientific racism., according to Christian Geulen― the change in the model of the human-biological sciences, already begun before the war, which meant the transition from eugenics to genetics and which was definitive when the structure of DNA was discovered in 1953.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, first on the left, around 1940. In 1952 he published the book by UNESCO Race and history which will constitute a fundamental turning point in making race a totally illegitimate concept to think of human differences: there is only one race, the human race, with its cultural differences.

Unesco, an international organization founded in November 1945, declared the «race» «the plague of the world» that had led humanity to the catastrophe and in the constitution act condemned «the dogma of the inequality of the races and men. The American anthropologist of Swiss origin Alfred Métraux, leader of the organization, commissioned Claude Lévi-Strauss to write an essay that would become his famous work "Race and History". Published in 1952, it will constitute a fundamental turning point on the subject by making race a totally illegitimate concept to think about human differences: there is only one race, the human race, with its cultural differences. From then on the term "race" ", if it is used, it will be understood as a social category and not as a natural fact. A "relatively broad anti-racist consensus" was thus reached, although it did not crystallize until the 1960s, driven by the different social movements of the decade, among which the movement for civil rights in the United States stood out, which contributed "in a notable way to delegitimize racism in the world conscience." "Racism was seen as an old-fashioned, reactionary, and essentially pre-modern phenomenon."

UNESCO used «mestizo» Brazil as a model, the country that would have overcome racial differences and put an end to racism ―an assessment that will be questioned years later―, while the counter-model will be apartheid South Africa, a country that was going "the reverse of history" by applying a declared racist policy, which will mean its progressive international isolation.

In the 1950s, the optimistic vision spread that once the concept of race was delegitimized ―the absence of human races is an admitted and proclaimed scientific truth― the extension of education would be enough to make racism disappear. The July-August 1950 issue of The UNESCO Courier states it on its front page: "Scientists the world over denounce an absurd myth... racism." A UNESCO commission Led by the American anthropologist Ashley Montagu, it proposed in 1950 to stop using the term "race" and replace it with the expression "ethnic group". The Canadian psychologist Otto Klineberg in turn proposes as a priority to undo the illusion of "racial purity." Following this same line, the French historians Lucien Febvre and François Crouzet wrote a "History Manual of French Civilization" entitled "We are mestizos" ("Nous sommes des sang-mêlés") but it will only be published many years later, although some extracts from it appeared in a German magazine in 1953. The book-manual was intended for teachers and secondary school students in order to develop the idea that humanity is "a great family of united peoples, and not a field closed to race battles that (badly) disguise horrible conflicts of interest.” In one of its chapters it was said: «Blessed is the nation that is not “pure”. Because in the extreme variety of types of individuals that compose it, you will be able to find citizens capable of facing all the difficulties, all the tests that life reserves for a group of men organized into a nation. And so much the better for her."

There were countries that went beyond the educational field ―such as France through the Pleven law approved in 1972― and considered racism, not an opinion but a crime. In other countries such as the United States, racist opinions were legal but there was a social pressure that reduced them to the circles of white supremacists.

However, biological racism, discredited as it was, did not completely disappear after 1945. In 1947 French historian Louis Chevalier explained that France had "racial values" that had to be defended against "foreign minorities". » who had caused so much harm to the country. In 1950, the Nobel Prize winner in physics, William Shockley, proposed sterilizing blacks for eugenic reasons. In 1994 Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published The Bell Curve in which they explained the less good results of black schoolchildren by innate intellectual deficiencies. In 2007, the American biochemist James Dewey Watson stated that the intelligence of Africans was inferior to that of Westerners. As Pap Ndiaye has highlighted, "the mediocre flame of biological racism has not been maintained except by far-right ideologues". In a 2020 survey, only 8% of French people considered that there were "races superior to others".

Alternative Cartel by Germany where it is said: " Islam does not belong to Germany. Women's freedom is not negotiable!" (Schleswig-Holstein, 2018). An example of feminationalism and also of nativism, Islamophobia and ethno-pluralism of ultra-right.

In 1972, the French sociologist Colette Guillaumin verified that the delegitimization of biological racism had not meant the disappearance of racism and proposed the concept of "racism without races" to designate a persistent form of rejection of the other that is not based on a discourse pure and simple biological but in the denunciation of customs and cultures so radically different that it would be impossible for them to live together. This is how the concept of "cultural" racism, "differentialist" racism or "neoracism" was established. In 1984 the French-Tunisian essayist Albert Memmi wrote:

There is a strange riddle about the problem of racism. No one, or almost anyone, sees himself as a racist, yet the discourse of racism remains tenacious and current. When he is questioned, the racist denies him and pales: the racist at all! You'd insult him if you insisted.

Cultural racism «is not based on a biological racial hierarchy (which it takes the precaution of condemning in general), but on cultural differences considered as irreducible and antagonistic between groups, and from which the dominant group should protect itself, if they don't want to disappear". can sometimes sprout a flash of creativity, but they are still inferior to theirs. "In determining what to protect against, what to improve and what to defend, you no longer foregrounds race, but rather culture, society, nation, or simply one's way of life."

Racism in Latin America

According to María Dolores París Pombo, in her article titled "Studies on racism in Latin America", published through the Department of Social Relations, of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Xochimilco, it They can distinguish two types of racist ideology in Latin America, which have different historical origins:

1. On the one hand, one can speak of racism originating from forced migration to Latin America from African populations and slavery.
2. This is based on a neocolonial ideology developed around the image of the indigenous.

There is currently no group in the region that officially calls itself racist and spreads its "beliefs" or perspectives with this approach expressly; Rather, this type of people manifests itself in a more diffuse way in various social strata, where racial categories are present on a daily basis as a basis for sociocultural assessment.

Likewise, these can be seen reflected in everyday elements that are commonly accepted by the general population, as in the case of the presence of very marked aesthetic references within advertising, in the media, in interpersonal and family relationships, etc.. even ways of referring to the physical appearance of people in the labor market: the "good presentation" required to fill positions that involve direct contact with customers or the general public. In these cases, it usually happens that the individual classified as "the indigenous" or "the black", have fewer possibilities of promotion in the workplace, access to important political positions at the national level, educational performance or cultural success.

Racism in Ecuador

The origin of racism in Ecuador dates back to the time of the conquest, that is, between the XV and XVI, since in these centuries relationships of political domination and socio-cultural subordination were established. From that moment on, non-European groups are considered inferior and non-rational according to their cultural tradition and their physical characteristics.

In Ecuadorian society it exists in the social imaginary, in the form of behavior patterns that make possible the segregation of ethnically and racially different people. This segregation in most cases occurs due to social prejudice or the objective of preserving the status quo that is managed by a majority demographic group that manages different positions of power within society. In Ecuador there are no laws that legitimize racism, but it does have practices that do and have also been justified by state and government institutions and by the media.

All this is due to the fact that the process of construction of the Ecuadorian identity has been erroneously structured based on skin color and physical appearance. This is supported thanks to the fact that the ideal of the "white" is always imposed in the advertising image, which does not represent the Ecuadorian reality. By way of building the sense of the Ecuadorian nation, it has been a contradictory process since on the one hand the notion of citizenship, participation and constitutional equality is promoted, but, on the other hand, in practice, ethnic-cultural intolerance towards the indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian groups.

The socio-cultural variety of Ecuador has generated a classification system in what is considered “normal” and that groups such as Afro-Ecuadorians or indigenous people do not enter the normality scale. This practice is the "ethno-centrism" that is part of every socio-cultural group, however, this process becomes negative when the other's physical differences are seen with intolerance and it becomes really negative when trying to eliminate these differences, or, therefore, eliminate social groups that correspond to the characteristics of the other. Discrimination and racism against Afro-Ecuadorians are related to poverty and exclusion. According to PRODEPINE, 92.7% of them do not have access to basic services. The 2001 census reveals that this town registers an NBI rate of more than 70% compared to 45% of whites and 61.3% nationally, its illiteracy exceeds 10.5% compared to 5% of whites and 9% nationally. While the college attendance rate barely exceeds 7 points compared to 19 for white youth and 14 for the national average.

Currently there is a multicultural and multi-ethnic recognition in Ecuador, although the structures of the unitary Ecuadorian State are maintained, which make it impossible to exercise the right to cultural difference and the constitution of an intercultural society. A discourse of multiculturalism is maintained that is used by the dominant groups as a strategy of symbolic usurpation.

The outlawing of racism

In many countries today, racism is penalized from minor to major penalties, considering this discrimination as a crime, the same thing that happens due to sexual orientation, culture or another characteristic. Some penalize it with sanctions such as the collection of fines with money or even custodial sentences.

Slavery

Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, father of the Mexican nation, issued the Decree against slavery, taxes and sealed paper on December 6, 1810 in the city of Guadalajara, abolishing slavery.

In Spain, slavery was not completely abolished until October 7, 1886. Although it was abolished in the peninsular territory in 1838, it persisted and was legally tolerated in the colonies under pressure from the "National Leagues" that they defended with patriotic arguments, until the creation of the transitory figure of the patronage and its definitive abolition in 1886.

Slavery was prohibited in the United States of America in 1864 after the Civil War through the Thirteenth Amendment.

Racial segregation

Racial segregation or separation is the separation of spaces, services and laws for people according to their ancestry. It was practiced in many parts of the world until the middle of the XX century.

In 1868, the segregationist laws that limited the civil rights of Afro-Cubans were repealed under the old Leyes de Indias, until then the legal code in force in Cuba, with the abolition of the "Blood Cleansing Statutes".

In the United States, unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, the workplace, and facilities serving the general public (“public places”) and in 1965 the Voting Rights Act.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, indicates that "everyone has the rights and freedoms proclaimed in this Declaration, without any distinction of race", being one of the most relevant documents contrary to discrimination and racial segregation.

International conventions against racism

It is thanks to the advance of the different sciences and the progressive retreat of social, moral and religious obscurantism, that since the last quarter of the century XX, there is a social stigma associated with those who describe themselves as racists. The causes are various, including social and technological progress, but mainly the attention generated by the crimes committed by the British and Spanish against the inhabitants of the Antilles and the Americas, the trade of European nations with African slaves, North Americans against Amerindian nations of the continent, the Turks with the extermination of the Armenians, or with Nazi Germany against Jews, Gypsies and others, and the horror caused by Imperial Japan in Korea, China and elsewhere, and the advances in the sociopolitical conquests of African Americans in USA

So the identification of a group or person as racist has a highly negative value charge. The last country to officially declare itself racist was South Africa, which in 1990 changed its apartheid system due to internal and external pressure.

The Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965) are the fundamental international instruments for understanding the human aspiration to eradicate racism. In order to reaffirm the commitment of the States to the elimination of racial discrimination and the effective realization of the principle of equality in the region in the framework of the Forty-third Regular Session of the General Assembly of the Organization of American States, carries out the Inter-American Convention against Racism, Racial Discrimination and Related Forms and Intolerance (2013), this instrument consolidates international standards on the matter, and advances in the legal definition of contemporary forms of racism.

International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is celebrated on March 21 of each year. On that day in 1960, police opened fire and killed 69 people at a peaceful demonstration against apartheid's "pass law" in Sharpeville, South Africa. By proclaiming the Day in 1966, the General Assembly urged the international community to redouble its efforts to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination. Since then, the apartheid system in South Africa has been dismantled. Racist laws and practices have been suppressed in many countries, and an international framework to fight racism has been built, guided by the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

Science, society and racism

The current concept of race is considered in scientific circles to be a European creation that developed as a response and justification to its imperial expansion over the centuries XVI to XX^{[citation required]}.

The concept of race, as a demonstration of the superiority or inferiority of certain human groups, progressively evolved during this period to very sophisticated and scholarly levels to become a true pseudoscience that more recently acquired names such as "ethnography" or "physical anthropology". ». The rise of these ideological doctrines disguised as science have not been insignificant and have resulted in regimes as destructive as Nazi Germany or Apartheid.

According to the American therapist Albert Ellis from cognitive psychology, racism is a mechanism of prejudices that arise out of convenience, to discriminate, discard or dominate other people or accept them preferentially, without having remorse and without reflecting on whether that is good or bad or if it is a subjective or objective opinion. Ordinarily it is a hostile or favorable attitude towards a person who belongs to a social group. In most cases, it is taken for granted that there is a natural or genetic inferiority in the segregated group, or rather, any circumstance that establishes the inferiority of its members. It is also common to put an accent on cultural differences, which would explain the inferiority or superiority of others. These are disturbances in the human mind that are moderately difficult to eliminate and lead to perceptual distortion or cognitive distortion, inaccurate judgment, or illogical interpretation. According to cognitive psychology, racism is a subjective passion for or against something without sufficient arguments to support this position. A bias is an error in information processing and causes people to have cognitive distortions. To test racist ideas, people must put their own thoughts to the test of rationality, functionality, and objectivity.

Racism in the cultural sphere

Racism in colonialist intellectual circles

In 1899 the poem The White Man's Burden appeared by the Indo-English writer Rudyard Kipling, who received the Nobel Prize eight years later, in which he summons the "White Man" to conquer and assume the government of the world, as a service to "non-white" people, even knowing that doing so would bring "the hatred of those you guard".

In 1911 the 14th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica embraced racist ideology by arguing that "the Negro is intellectually inferior to the Caucasian".

Definitely no beer is sold to the Indians (U.S.A., 1941)

Already in the 1930s, the popular comic strip The Adventures of Tintin, by Hergé, appeared in France, bearer of the racist thought that had embodied in Western thought, especially notable in stories such as Tintin in the Congo (1930-1931) or The Broken Ear (1935).

Chamberlain: for being the superior group of the superior race

In 1899 the racist ideology was consolidated with the publication of the book The Fundamentals of the XIX century from English Houston S. Chamberlain. Deepening Gobineau's ideas, Chamberlain accentuates the role of the Germanic-Nordic peoples, as authentic representatives of the hypothetical "Aryan race", and therefore superior to all others. Chamberlain argues that the entry of the Germanic peoples into history, around the year 1200, signified "the rise of a new world," European civilization, and that this historical process, still ongoing, consists of the "gradual rise of a Teutonic world" in which foreign non-Teutonic elements will be sunk like pirate ships.

In the great powers of the time, authors appeared who tried to prove that the "superior race" were the Saxons (Great Britain and the United States), the Celts (France), and the Teutons (Germany). Several British thinkers of the time used racism to justify the British Empire, such as Thomas Henry Huxley (The Struggle for Existence in Human Society, 1888), Benjamin Kidd (Social Evolution, 1894), P. Charles Michel (A Biological View of Our International Politics, 1896), Charles Harvey (The Biology of British Politics, 1904).

In 1902, American novelist Thomas Dixon, Jr. published Leopard Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden - 1865-1900, the first novel in a racist trilogy based on the ideology of white supremacism, which would also include The Clansmen (The man of the Clan), in which the Ku Klux Klan is glorified. Based on this trilogy, D. W. Griffith filmed the film The Birth of a Nation in 1915.

Anténor Firmin: Treatise on the equality of the human races

In 1885 the Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin published his treatise De l´egalité des races humaines, (Of the equality of the human races), in response to the famous book de Gobineau (De la Inegalité des races humaines), and colonialism, at a time when Europeans divided up Africa at the Berlin Conference, ignoring its inhabitants. A forerunner of anti-racist thought and modern anthropology, Firmin's work would be ignored by European academics for decades, until the moral collapse of the Holocaust forced the world's powers to take a public stand against racism.

Audiovisual media

There were also movies and soap operas that show the reality of racism, in the case of American cinema, certain film producers have been accused of being racist by putting antagonistic characters such as blacks, Asians, Hispanic Americans, even the indigenous people of North America. Also some soap operas, especially Mexican, Brazilian, Colombian, Venezuelan and among others, that have tried to overcome racism, for example, putting a humble woman from the rural sector as the main protagonist and who comes to the city in search of a better future and the antagonists are those of high social class who promote discrimination and finally the girl manages to match the level of her opponents. One of the soap operas that has tried to overcome these racist barriers is that of Niña moza, a girl who is the daughter of landowners and the upper class who fights in favor of slaves to abolish slavery and recognize the rights of African American freedom.

Racism in education

First of all, it must be mentioned that education not only encompasses educational centers, but also families, since parents are the first educators. It should be noted that in 1933, the family was the most important institution as a socializer in equality and solidarity. With this, it is reflected that home education influences the child's beliefs more than we think, either negatively or positively.

However, focusing on educational centers, immigrants undergo a period of adaptation. Most immigrants arrive in the country fleeing their economic situation in the country of origin. One of the biggest difficulties encountered upon arrival is the language, and that is where schools must implement useful methods for their learning. Not only the language is one of the factors that they do not know, but the culture since they have another way of living or being, and it can cause a culture shock.

After this, people have to socialize, and school is an essential factor and an opportunity for children or young people to start relating. However, on many occasions immigrants have difficulties both with their peers and with some teachers, which would lead to the formation of a group of equals from the same place of origin or immigrants. In the schools themselves there is discrimination and racism, the victims often prefer to go to schools where the percentage of immigrants is high so as not to feel uncomfortable. In addition, it should be noted that they prefer to go to public centers than to private ones, since they find more racist attitudes there. All these racist attitudes, comments or actions are usually carried out by young people in a group or not alone. Many of the victims of racism prefer to keep quiet and others prefer to tell teachers. In addition, there are prejudices or stereotypes about the academic possibilities and future of immigrants.

Bullying related to skin color increases in statistics while in schools it continues to be minimized. The absence of specific protocols makes the battle of mothers, sons and daughters who suffer this harassment harder.

Other forms of racism

In addition to the classist forms of racism, there are other less well-known forms such as aversive racism, mestizophobia and hidden racism.

Aversive Racism

In 1986, two social psychologists, Samuel L. Gaertner and John F. Dovidio, coined the term "aversive racism" to define the racism of those who do not consider themselves racist. It is characterized by a non-explicit racism and that due to its subtle nature and execution does not "knowingly" it appears diluted. It is the one of those who begin their sentences with a "I am not racist, but...". Or those who make racist jokes as if they have no consequences. But it has them: it produces great helplessness and frustration in its victims. It has also been called microracism. For example, it prevents people of Ibero-American and Spanish descent from mixing in the school environment.

Mestizophobia

A less well-known form of racism is the belief that miscegenation produces individuals inferior to the "pure race" (degeneracy), advocated by Louis Agassiz, as Gobineau argued.

A modern form of racism, as a reaction to racism against blacks, Indians and Asians, is to deny mixed-race identity and defend mixed populations more because of their dark skin color than because of their mixed-race condition. In this racism, mestizo populations are treated as black, Indian or white, denying their peculiarity.

Hidden racism

Hidden racism is a form of non-explicit racism that seeks to extend and legitimize racism. Among the most common variants of hidden racism are the aforementioned social and medical pseudosciences, political arguments against certain human groups under cultural or ethnic pretexts, and the manipulation of statistical data in order to indirectly infer the inferiority of some human groups. about others. It is worth mentioning in this regard that one of the most ominous forms of hidden racism is the post-facto and non-causal relationship between belonging to a certain "race" or "ethnic group" and belonging to a social class.

The classification of people as belonging to one race or another has been widely used and still is to keep human groups in a situation of subjection, to life conditions of oppression, ignorance and dependency, and to accuse these groups of be inferior when they are only victims and not causes of the problem. Likewise, this classification was used and is used to maintain the position of greater power of other groups within the social scale, establishing a vicious circle of feedback between socioeconomic status and belonging to certain "races". This mechanism feeds on itself and tends to perpetuate ad infinitum until inevitable changes occur in society.

Related concepts

Some concepts such as racial discrimination and xenophobia are related to racism although they are not.

Racial discrimination

It is a concept that is usually identified with that of racism and that encompasses it, although these are concepts that do not coincide exactly. While racism is an ideology based on the superiority of some races or ethnic groups over others, racial discrimination is an act that, although usually based on a racist ideology, it is not always. In this sense, it must be taken into account that positive racial discrimination (when discrimination is established in order to guarantee the equality of the people affected), constitutes a form of discrimination aimed at combating racism.

Prejudice is a social attitude propagated among people by an exploiting class, in order to stigmatize some group as inferior, so that both the exploitation of the group and its resources can be justified. Roger Bastide distinguishes race prejudice from the other prejudices that are: color, class and cultural prejudice.

Xenophobia

Racism is often closely related and confused with xenophobia, that is, "hatred, disgust or hostility towards foreigners". However, there are some differences between the two concepts, since racism is an ideology of superiority, while xenophobia is a feeling of rejection; On the other hand, xenophobia is directed only against foreigners, unlike racism. Racism is also related to other concepts with which it is sometimes confused, such as ethnocentrism and colonialism.