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Racism

race or ethnic-based discrimination

Racism may include prejudice, discrimination, belief in the superiority of one race over another, antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity, and the belief that members of different races or ethnicities should be treated differently.

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

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  • Sexual racism is a specific form of racial prejudice enacted in the context of sex or romance. Online, people use sex and dating profiles to describe racialized Sexual attraction through language such as “Not attracted to Asians.” Among gay and bisexual men, sexual racism is a highly contentious issue. Although some characterize discrimination among partners on the basis of race as a form of racism, others present it as a matter of preference. In May 2011, 2177 gay and bisexual men in Australia participated in an online survey that assessed how acceptably they viewed online sexual racism. Although the men sampled displayed diverse attitudes, many were remarkably tolerant of sexual racism. We conducted two multiple linear regression analyses to compare factors related to men’s attitudes toward sexual racism online and their racist attitudes more broadly. Almost every identified factor associated with men’s racist attitudes was also related to their attitudes toward sexual racism. The only differences were between men who identified as Asian or Indian. Sexual racism, therefore, is closely associated with generic racist attitudes, which challenges the idea of racial attraction as solely a matter of personal preference.
  • In the first place, an unjust law exists in this Commonwealth, by which marriages between persons of different color is pronounced illegal. I am perfectly aware of the gross ridicule to which I may subject myself by alluding to this particular; but I have lived too long, and observed too much, to be disturbed by the world's mockery... In the first place, the government ought not to be invested with power to control the affections, any more than the consciences of citizens. A man has at least as good a right to choose his wife, as he has to choose his religion. His taste may not suit his neighbors; but so long as his deportment is correct, they have no right to interfere with his concerns... I do not know how the affair at Canterbury is generally considered; but I have heard individuals of all parties and all opinions speak of it—and never without merriment or indignation. Fifty years hence, the black laws of Connecticut will be a greater source of amusement to the antiquarian, than her famous blue laws.
  • Racism tends to attract attention when it's flagrant and filled with invective. But like all bigotry, the most potent component of racism is frame-flipping - positioning the bigot as the actual victim. So the gay do not simply want to marry; they want to convert our children into sin. The Jews do not merely want to be left in peace; they actually are plotting world take-over. And the blacks are not actually victims of American power, but beneficiaries of the war against hard-working whites. This is a respectable, more sensible, bigotry, one that does not seek to name-call, preferring instead change the subject and straw man. Thus segregation wasn't necessary to keep the niggers in line; it was necessary to protect the honor of white women.

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  • The colonization of the Southern economy by capitalists from the North gave lynching its most vigorous impulse. If Black people, by means of terror and violence, could remain the most brutally exploited group within the swelling ranks of the working class, the capitalists could enjoy a double advantage. Extra profits would result from the superexploitation of Black labor, and white workers’ hostilities toward their employers would be defused. White workers who assented to lynching necessarily assumed a posture of racial solidarity with the white men who were really their oppressors. This was a critical moment in the popularization of racist ideology.
  • That there have been in all ages and in all countries, in every quarter of the habitable globe, especially among those nations laying the greatest claim to civilization and enlightenment, classes of people who have been deprived of equal privileges, political, religious and social, cannot be denied, and that this deprivation on the part of the ruling classes is cruel and unjust, is also equally true. Such classes have even been looked upon as inferior to their oppressors, and have ever been mainly the domestics and menials of society, doing the low offices and drudgery of those among whom they lived, moving about and existing by mere sufferance, having no rights nor privileges but those conceded by the common consent of their political superiors. These are historical facts that cannot be controverted.
    • Martin Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852), Chapter 1
  • Wherever there is arbitrary rule, there must be necessity, on the part of the dominant classes, superiority be assumed. To assume superiority, is to deny the equality of others.
    • Martin Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852), Chapter 1

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  • The continual subjugation of the masses depends on competition and internal disunity. As long as discrimination exists, and racial or ethnic minorities are oppressed, the entire working class is oppressed and weakened. This is so because the Capitalist class is able to use racism to drive down the wages of individual segments of the working class by inciting racial antagonism and forcing a fight for jobs and services. This division is a development that ultimately undercuts the living standards of all workers. Moreover, by pitting whites against Blacks and other oppressed nationalities, the Capitalist class is able to prevent workers from uniting against their common class enemy. As long as workers are fighting each other, Capitalist class rule is secure.

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  • If it can plausibly be argued that 'race' is not a genetically meaningful concept, the question the historian must address is why it has nevertheless been such a powerful and violent preoccupation of modern times. An answer that suggests itself - also, as it happens, from the literature on evolutionary biology - is that racism, in the sense of a strongly articulated sense of racial differentiation, is one of those 'mêmes' characterized by Richard Dawkins as behaving in the realm of ideas the way genes behave in the natural world. The idea of biologically distinct races, ironically, has been able to reproduce itself and retain its integrity far more successfully than the races it claims to identify.
    • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. li

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  • Once again a 'hate stare' drew my attention like a magnet. It came from a middle-aged, heavyset, well-dressed white man. He sat a few yards away, fixing his eyes on me. Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it (rather than its threat) terrifies you. It was so new I could not take my eyes from the man's face. I felt like saying, 'What in God's name are you doing to yourself?'
  • So the noise poured forth like a jazzed-up fugue, louder and louder to cover the whisper in every man’s soul. “You are black. You are condemned.” This is what the white man mistook for “jubilant living” and called “whooping it up.” This is how the white man can say, “They live like dogs,” never realizing why they must, to save themselves, shout, get drunk, shake the hip, pour pleasures into bellies deprived of happiness. Otherwise, the sounds from the quarter would lose order and rhythm and become wails.”
  • The social studies I’ve read... don’t deal with any basic difference in human nature between black and white... They only study the effects of environment on human nature. You place the white man in the ghetto, deprive him of educational advantages, arrange it so he has to struggle hard to fulfill his instinct for self-respect, give him little physical privacy and less leisure, and he would after a time assume the same characteristics you attach to the Negro. These characteristics don’t spring from whiteness or blackness, but from a man’s conditioning.
  • What fragmented individualism really meant was what happened to a black man who tried to make it in this society: in order to succeed, he had to become an imitation white man - dress white, talk white, think white, express the values of middle-class white culture (at least when he was in the presence of white men). Implied in all this was the hiding, the denial, of his selfhood, his negritude, his culture, as though they were somehow shameful. If he succeeded, he was an alienated marginal man - alienated from the strength of his culture and from fellow black men, and never able, of course, to become that imitation white man because he bore the pigment that made the white man view him as intrinsically other.
  • The emotional garbage I had carried all of those years - the prejudice and the denial, the shame and the guilt - was dissolved by understanding that the Other is not other at all.
  • By keeping “peaceful” in this instance, we end up consenting to the destruction of all peace - for so long as we condone injustice by a small but powerful group, we condone the destruction of all social stability, all real peace

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  • This idea of a post-racial society was quite possibly the most sophisticated racist idea ever created. Because unlike previous racist ideas, that specifically told us how we should think about particular people of color, or how we should think about this particular racial group. What post-racial ideas did was it said to us racism doesn't exist, racist policy doesn't exist, in the face of all of these racial inequities. And so then it caused us to say, OK, this inequity, like, the black unemployment rate being twice as high as the white unemployment rate, it can't exist because of racism. It must exist because there's something wrong with black workers.
  • And if we are to open employment opportunities in this country for members of all races and creeds, then the Federal Government must set an example…. The President himself must set the key example. I am not going to promise a Cabinet post or any other post to any race or ethnic group. That is racism in reverse at its worst. So I do not promise to consider race or religion in my appointments if I am successful. I promise only that I will not consider them.
    • John F. Kennedy, campaign speech, Wittenberg College, Springfield, Ohio (October 17, 1960); Freedom of Communications, final report of the Committee on Commerce, United States Senate, part 1 (1961), p. 635. Senate Rept. 87–994.
  • When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered. We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force.
  • Your accepted conceptions of cosmogony — whether from the theological or scientific standpoints —do not enable you to solve a single anthropological or even ethnical problem and they stand in your way whenever you attempt to solve the problem of the races on this planet... Go on saying, Our planet and man were created — and you will be fighting against hard facts for ever, analyzing and losing time over trifling details—unable to even grasp the whole.

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  • Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.

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  • Racial discrimination in the United States is a product of the colonialist and imperialist system. The contradiction between the Black masses in the United States and the U.S. ruling circles is a class contradiction. Only by overthrowing the reactionary rule of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class and destroying the colonialist and imperialist system can the Black people in the United States win complete emancipation. The Black masses and the masses of white working people in the United States have common interests and common objectives to struggle for. Therefore, the Afro-American struggle is winning sympathy and support from increasing numbers of white working people and progressives in the United States. The struggle of the Black people in the United States is bound to merge with the American workers’ movement, and this will eventually end the criminal rule of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class.
  • It would be a great mistake to look upon racism as an irrational doctrine: racism is not a doctrine of irrationalism, it is the very surging up of irrationalism as an elemental force, getting rid of all doctrine, truth and rational structure.
    • Jacques Maritain (1939), The Twilight of Civilization (La crépuscule de la civilisation), translated by Lionel Landry. London: Sheed & Ward, 1946, p. 21.
  • Timothy Tseng reports that Christian theological engagements with race have been chequered. For the most part, Christians in history have accommodated the dominant views of human nature, whether the Great Chain of Being rooted in Aristotelian thought or the emancipated self rooted in the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, the church’s core affirmations about the imago dei, “one blood” origins of humanity, the universality of sin, the universal availability of salvation through Jesus Christ, and eschatological vision of the nations before the throne of God often challenged the racism that accompanied European expansionism. Tesng notes that while evangelical theology did little or nothing to engage race and racism in previous centuries, evangelical awakenings and the Pentecostal movement helped the Church see with greater clarity the transracial implications of the gospel, and helped dispel the mythical character of “race.” He urges evangelicals to examine hidden assumptions, use ethnic studies and critical race theory, speak prophetically against racism, and pay attention not only to multiracial but also ethnic congregations.
  • Because their acts of racism often have been so violent and blatant, discussions of racism over the years have centered on conservatives and hardcore racists. But as these few paragraphs have attempted to show, although they have not been publicly associated with acts of physical violence acts, Christian liberals are little different than their conservative counterparts when it comes to embracing the twisted Protestant theological ideas first planted by the Puritans.
    The one glaring difference between the two groups is that liberals throughout American history have learned to be more sophisticated with their antiblackess. From the Puritan era to the present, their sophistication often has been in the form of an eerie silence regarding the matter of race and racism. For example, the writings of heralded American theologians stretching from Jonathan Edwards through H. Richard Niebuhr, and Paul Tilich are conspicuously empty of any critical analysis of the interplay between Christian ideas of racism. While all of these “giants” wrote volumes analyzing the finer points of theology and showing how theology relates to human enterprises, none raised a question about how Protestants repeatedly have corrupted theology in order to justify antiblackness as God-ordained.
    As we seek to not only understand but also to find solutions to the persistent problem of racism, the silence of these revered liberal Protestant thinkers is most troubling. Troubling because their writings – void of any critique of Protestantism’s racist history – are the very ones that seminaries and graduate schools of religion continue to lift up as standard reasoning for all who would learn and embrace the Protestant faith. Free of any critique of Protestant history in shaping racist attitudes, these writings give the false illusion that this faith is colorblind. But as these pages have attempted to demonstrate, skin color has always been one of the key embraces of many who embrace this tradition. Indeed, as Kyle Haselden said, Protestanism in the hands of bigoted Christians has long been the “other of racial patterns, the purveyor of arrant sedatives, and the teacher of moral moralities” as it relates to black people (Haselden, 1964:14).
  • Rarely does a historian venture solutions. But I offer one here. In an era when some are asking again what can we do to bring an end to race prejudice, we must once more insist that Protestant churches are one, if not the, starting point. The churches hold this status because they still have not confessed and repented of their sins in making racism a cornerstone of this society. If there is any hope of a day when antiblackness will no longer be a hallmark of the society, Christians must rise up and be the first to confess the mighty role Protestantism has played in shaping that bigotry. Such a confession has been difficult for a variety of reasons. But the neglect of scholars to tell the story of how Protetantism and its theologians, from the Puritan era to the present, often have been leaders in planting, resowing, and resowing again and again the evil seeds of race hate into the very soul of America stands large.

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  • The inequity of minority imprisonment is not only one of greater numbers, it is also one of greater duration of confinement once imprisoned. It has become increasingly evident that, proportionally, minority group members convicted of crimes are at greater risk of being: (a) sentenced to a term of imprisonment, (b) sentenced to a longer term of imprisonment, and (c) forced to serve a longer portion of any given term of imprisonment.
    • National Minority Advisory Council, "The Inequality of Justice: A Report on Crime and the Administration of Justice in the Minority Community", Office of Justice Assistance, Research and Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., September 1980, p. 243), as qtd. in Joan Petersilia, "Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System", National Institute of Corrections, Department of Justice, (June 1983), p. 63.

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  • The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.
  • The colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black... Does it follow that tis right to enslave a man because he is black? Will short curl'd hair like wool, of christian hair, as tis called by those, hearts are as hard as the nether millstone, help the argument? Can any logical inference in favour of slavery, be drawn from a flat nose, a long or a short face.
  • When the mind senses a potentially harmful situation, it tells the body to prepare by increasing its heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure. This response helped earlier humans outrun or fight predators and enemies.
    Today’s stressful situations, more likely a challenging interaction at work or a misbehaving child, result in the same physical reactions even though we are less likely to experience physical danger. The problem is, when this stress response is repeated frequently over time, evidence shows it leads to health problems including depression, anxiety, insomnia, heart disease, skin rashes, and gastrointestinal problems—just to name a few.
    Now a growing body of evidence demonstrates that racial discrimination triggers this stress response. As a result, racial minorities may experience more health problems compared to others. One review of 121 studies published in 2013 found that youth between the ages of 12 and 18 who experienced discrimination were significantly more likely to experience mental health problems such as depression and anxiety compared to those who did not experience discrimination. Another review of 66 studies found that black American adults who perceived they were subjected to racism were more likely to experience mental health problems and more likely to report a lower quality of life.

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  • I always say that racism is like pneumonia and anti-Semitism is like the common cold—everybody has it.
  • Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike: as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called "diversity" actually perpetuate racism. Their obsession with racial group identity is inherently racist. The true antidote to racism is liberty. Liberty means having a limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims. Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence, not skin color, gender, or ethnicity.
  • We are led to believe that racism is prejudicial behavior of one party against another rather than the coagulation of socioeconomic injustice against groups. If the state acts without prejudice (this is, if it acts equally), then that is proof of the end of racism. Unequal socioeconomic conditions of today, based as they are on racisms of the past and of the present, are thereby rendered untouchable by the state. Color-blind justice privatizes inequality and racism, and it removes itself from the project of redistributive and anti-racist justice. This is the genteel racism of our new millennium.
    • Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (2002), p. 38

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I cannot consent to take the position that the door of hope — the door of opportunity — is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or color. Such an attitude would, according to my convictions, be fundamentally wrong. ~ Theodore Roosevelt
  • Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage—the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
    • Ayn Rand, "Racism", The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
  • Racism claims that the content of a man's mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man's convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical forces beyond his control. This is the caveman's version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.
  • Today, racism is regarded as a crime if practiced by a majority—but as an inalienable right if practiced by a minority.
    • Ayn Rand - The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971)
  • The simple fact is that no people can enslave another for centuries without coming out with a notion of superiority, and when the color and other physical traits of those peoples were quite different it was inevitable that the prejudice should take a racist form.
  • European planters and miners enslaved Africans for economic reasons, so that their labor power could be exploited. [...] Then, having become utterly dependent on African labor, Europeans at home and abroad found it necessary to rationalize that exploitation in racist terms as well. Oppression follows logically from exploitation, so as to guarantee the latter. Oppression of African people on purely racial grounds accompanied, strengthened, and became indistinguishable from oppression for economic reasons.
  • We are a nation of many nationalities, many races, many religions, bound together by a single unity, the unity of freedom and equality. Whoever seeks to set one nationality against another, seeks to degrade all nationalities. Whoever seeks to set one race against another seeks to enslave all races. Whoever seeks to set one religion against another, seeks to destroy all religion.
    • Franklin D. Roosevelt, campaign address, Brooklyn, New York (1 November 1940); The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1940 (1941), p. 53
  • I cannot consent to take the position that the door of hope — the door of opportunity — is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or color. Such an attitude would, according to my convictions, be fundamentally wrong.

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  • The real tragedy is that there are some ignorant brothers out here. That's why I'm not on this all-white or all-black shit. I'm on this all-real or all fake shit with people, whatever color you are. Because niggas will do you. I mean, there's some niggas out there; the same niggas that did Malcolm X, the same niggas that did Jesus Christ; every 'brother' ain't a brother. They will do you. So just because it's black, don't mean it's cool; and just because it's white don't mean it's evil.
    • Tupac Shakur, from an interview, as quoted in Tupac: Resurrection (2003)
  • Several studies have shown a positive correlation between perceived experiences with discrimination and measures of psychological distress. Indeed, perceived discrimination predicted psychiatric symptoms related to depression and anxiety better than age, gender, education, social class, or general stressors. Other studies have shown a positive correlation between self-reported perceptions of discrimination and poor physical health outcomes including stroke, heart attack, diabetes, cancer, and lower birth weight babies. In addition, several studies have shown a positive correlation between perceptions of racial/ethnic discrimination and physiological outcomes, including resting BP, BP reactivity, and hypertensive status. Such correlational evidence, however, is not sufficient to conclude that perceived discrimination per se causes increases in BP.
  • For those of you who are tired of hearing about racism, imagine how much more tired we are of experiencing it. ... The degree to which it is hard or uncomfortable for you to have the issue raised is the degree to which you know inside of yourself that you aren't dealing with the issue. ... I want to say right here that this is not a "guilt trip." It's a fact trip.
    • Barbara Smith, "Racism and Women's Studies," Speech delivered at the 1979 National Women's Studies Association Annual Conference, as cited in Black Feminism Reimagined After Intersectionality (Duke University Press: 2018), p. 86
  • If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today.
    • Thomas Sowell - Creators Syndicate November 28, 1998.
  • Racism has never done this country any good, and it needs to be fought against, not put under new management for different groups.
    • Thomas Sowell - "Out of Context", Jewish World Review, 2 June 2009

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  • We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.
  • Among these widely differing families of men, the first that attracts attention, the superior in intelligence, in power, and in enjoyment, is the white, or European, the MAN pre-eminently so called, below him appear the Negro and the Indian... The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments, or the future dangers of the United States, the observer is invariably led to this as a primary fact... You may set the Negro free, but you cannot make him otherwise than an alien to the European. Nor is this all we scarcely acknowledge the common features of humanity in this stranger whom slavery has brought among us. His physiognomy is to our eyes hideous, his understanding weak, his tastes low; and we are almost inclined to look upon him as a being intermediate between man and the brutes.
  • The other problem with saying that people like that are just a product of their time is that not everyone at that time did think like that, and it kinda lets them off the hook. A lot of people thought that slavery was okay, but you know what: The slaves didn’t. And they said so, pretty loudly and often. So if other people thought that slavery was alright, it wasn’t ‘cause they didn’t know, it’s because they chose not to listen to that. They chose not to know.
  • I have black guys counting my money! I hate it. ... The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. ... Laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that.
    • Donald Trump, "Recalled" by John "Jack" O'Donnell, former president of Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino in "Trumped!: The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump -His Cunning Rise and Spectacular Fall", (1991-01-01), John R. O'Donnell, James Rutherford, Simon & Schuster, New York, cited in "Ignoring Trump's Record of Racism", Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (2011-05-06).
  • What is racism? The word has represented daily reality to millions of black people for centuries, yet it is rarely defined—perhaps just because that reality has been such a commonplace. By “racism” we mean the predication of decisions and policies on considerations of race for the purpose of subordinating a racial group and maintaining control over that group. That has been the practice of this country toward the black man; we shall see why and how. Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals, which cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property. This type can be recorded by television cameras; it can frequently be observed in the process of commission. The second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts. But it is no less destructive of human life. The second type originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first type.
  • When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society. But when in that same city—Birmingham, Alabama—five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism. When a black family moves into a home in a white neighborhood and is stoned, burned or routed out, they are victims of an overt act of individual racism which many people will condemn—at least in words. But it is institutional racism that keeps black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estate agents. The society either pretends it does not know of this latter situation, or is in fact incapable of doing anything meaningful about it.
  • Racism is not merely exclusion on the basis of race but exclusion for the purpose of subjugating or maintaining subjugation. The goal of the racists is to keep black people on the bottom, arbitrarily and dictatorially, as they have done in this country for over three hundred years.
  • Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare.
    • Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (1899).

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  • Our acceptance of race-based state action has been rare for a reason. “Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.” Rice v. Cayetano, 528 U. S. 495, 517 (2000) (quoting Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U. S. 81, 100 (1943)). That principle cannot be overridden except in the most extraordinary case.
    • US Supreme Court, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. ___ (2023)
  • We cannot be guided by those who would desire less in our Constitution, or by those who would desire more. “The Constitution abhors classifications based on race, not only because those classifications can harm favored races or are based on illegitimate motives, but also because every time the government places citizens on racial registers and makes race relevant to the provision of burdens or benefits, it demeans us all.” Grutter, 539 U. S., at 353 (opinion of THOMAS, J.).
    • US Supreme Court, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. ___ (2023)
  • The solution to our Nation’s racial problems thus cannot come from policies grounded in affirmative action or some other conception of equity. Racialism simply cannot be undone by different or more racialism. Instead, the solution announced in the second founding is incorporated in our Constitution: that we are all equal, and should be treated equally before the law without regard to our race. Only that promise can allow us to look past our differing skin colors and identities and see each other for what we truly are: individuals with unique thoughts, perspectives, and goals, but with equal dignity and equal rights under the law.
    • US Supreme Court, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. ___ (2023)
  • One of the principal reasons race is treated as a forbidden classification is that it demeans the dignity and worth of a person to be judged by ancestry instead of by his or her own merit and essential qualities.
    • US Supreme Court, Rice v. Cayetano, 528 U.S. 495 (2000)

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  • There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy. We have consistently denied the constitutionality of measures which restrict the rights of citizens on account of race. There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.
  • Arbeiter horch, sie ziehn ins Feld,
    Und schreien für Nation und Rasse.
    Das ist der Krieg der Herrscher der Welt
    Gegen die Arbeiterklasse.
  • Ethnic cleansing was orthodox socialism for a century or more... So the socialist intelligentsia of the western world entered the first world war publicly committed to racial purity and white domination, and no less committed to violence.
    • George G. Watson "The Lost Literature of Socialism" (1998), UK: Lutterworth Press, Cambridge, pp. 78-79
  • The authority of science … promotes and encourages the activity of observing, comparing, measuring and ordering the physical characteristics of human bodies.… Cartesian epistemology and classical ideals produced forms of rationality, scientificity and objectivity that, though efficacious in the quest for truth and knowledge, prohibited the intelligibility and legitimacy of black equality…. In fact, to "think" such an idea was to be deemed irrational, barbaric or mad.
  • Racism should be viewed as an intervening variable. You give me a set of conditions and I can produce racism in any society. You give me a different set of conditions and I can reduce racism. You give me a situation where there are a sufficient number of social resources so people don't have to compete for those resources, and I will show you a society where racism is held in check. If we could create the conditions that make racism difficult, or discourage it, then there would be less stress and less need for affirmative action programs. One of those conditions would be an economic policy that would create tight labor markets over long periods of time. Now does that mean that affirmative action is here only temporarily? I think the ultimate goal should be to remove it.

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  • In the past, yes, I have made sweeping indictments of all white people. I will never be guilty of that again — as I know now that some white people are truly sincere, that some truly are capable of being brotherly toward a black man. The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks.

“Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis” (1988)

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The kind of “science” that found expression in scientific racism claimed that the empirically real exhausts the ontologically possible, that the way things are is the way things ought to be. Scientific racism was an explanatory program, but it was also a political program, designed to reinforce certain power relations as natural and inevitable.
 
Racial scientists were remarkably creative in their attempts to explain the odious effects of racial miscegenation. Wilhelm Hildebrandt, for example, in his 1935 “Racial Mixing and Disease”, argued that the maladies produced by racial miscegenation were a product of the fact that different races have different life spans and that bodily organs therefore mature and degenerate at different rates. If a long-lived person were to mate with a short-lived person, then the various organs might mature and die at different rates, disturbing the “equilibrium” found in relatively pure races.

Proctor, Robert (1988). “Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis”. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-74578-0. OCLC 20760638.

  • Scientific racism is older than one might imagine. As early as 1727 the earl of Boulaivilliers tried to argue that the noblemen of France represented descendants of an original and superior race of longheaded Nordic Franks, whereas the lower estates of French society were descended from subjugated Celtic Gauls. Boulainvilliers’ doctrine was intended to support the claims of vested nobility against the critics of noble privilege. Critics of that privilege turned to quite another metaphor to explain the origins of human institutions and character: philosophers championing a new and enlightened liberalism argued that it was nurture, rather than nature, that was responsible for determining a man’s standing. Enlightenment enthusiasts invested climate or education with extraordinary powers: Dr. Samuel Smith, seventh president of Princeton College; speculated toward the end of the eighteenth century that Negro pigmentation was the result of “a large freckle” that spread itself over the body after long exposure to the tropical sun. Dr. Benjamin Rush speculated that all babies were born white, and that the distinctive coloration of the Negro arose as a “mild form of leprosy,” from which a certain former slave named Hery Moss was said to be undergoing a spontaneous cure.
    In the period of history we call the Enlightenment, many of those who claimed that race was the product of climate or disease also argued that the races of men were equal to one another in dignity or character. Locke, for example, argued that the human mind was at birth a blank slate, or “empty cabinet,” and that character was the product of education, or soil, or climate. The Scottish philosopher Lord Monboddo suggested that, with proper training, even certain apes (such as the chimpanzee) might one day be taught to speak and to reason.
    • Ch.1 “The Origins of Racial Hygiene”, pp.10-11
  • Enlightenment “environmentalism” emerges in what many saw as a hopeful period of history. Many imagined that social, sexual, or racial differences separating the various stations of men and women would be soon overcome through proper implementation of social reforms and legislation. In the French Revolution many aristocratic privileges were overthrown. Jews were granted certain civil liberties, and feminists wrote treatises of “the Rights of Woman.” The liberal spirit of “liberte”, egalite”, and fraternite”, offered hope that, given equal opportunity and the rule of enlightened laws, the free play of economic markets might soon eradicate social differences and inequalities.
    Enlightenment philosophers were not of course willing to grant the privileges of liberty, equality, and fraternity to everyone. John Locke, himself a merchant adventurer in the African slave trade, defended slavery as the natural consequence of relations that ensue form the fighting of a “just war.” The American Constitution recognized the legitimacy fo slavery and extended the full “rights of man” only to propertied white males. Enlightened European philosophers championed liberty and yet made the enjoyment of liberty contingent upon the practice of “reason,” a faculty shared unequally among humans. David Hume, for example, compared the intelligence of the Negro to that of a parrot, an argued that a man of this race could never achieve a status equal to that of the European. Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed that women were inferior to men in the sphere of reason and therefore did not deserve the same rights as men. Such were the kinds of views that led Samuel Johnson, in the middle of the eighteenth century, to ask, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
    • pp.10-11
  • In 1853-1855 Arthur Comte de Gobineau published his pioneering “Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races”. The significance of Gobineau’s treatise was that, for the first time, race was cast as the primary moving force of world history. According to Gobineau, “racial vitality” lies at the root of all great transformations in history. Greece flourished because of it; Rome fell for want of it. Gobeau argued that the shift from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age was the result of one race seizing the reins of history from another; racial movement is the root cause of all that is grand in history.
    Gobineau’s theory was not initially well received in Europe. Tocueville, for example, in a letter to Gobineau, pointed out that the racial theorist would probably find a better audience for his ideas among the slave-owning planters of the American South.
    The significance of Gobeau’s theory was not just that he saw the history of the world as a history of racial struggle. Equally important was his contention that his racial history was a science”. Racial or ethnic prejudice, after all, predates Gobineau by many hudreds of years. Yet prior to the nineteenth century, racial or ethnic prejudice was couched primarily in religious rather than biological or racial terms.
    • p.12
  • The kind of “science” that found expression in scientific racism claimed that the empirically real exhausts the ontologically possible, that the way things are is the way things ought to be. Scientific racism was an explanatory program, but it was also a political program, designed to reinforce certain power relations as natural and inevitable.
    • p.13
  • Racial scientists were remarkably creative in their attempts to explain the odious effects of racial miscegenation. Wilhelm Hildebrandt, for example, in his 1935 “Racial Mixing and Disease”, argued that the maladies produced by racial miscegenation were a product of the fact that different races have different life spans and that bodily organs therefore mature and degenerate at different rates. If a long-lived person were to mate with a short-lived person, then the various organs might mature and die at different rates, disturbing the “equilibrium” found in relatively pure races.
    • p.179

See also

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