Racism

Racism consists of ideologies and practices that seek to justify, or cause, the unequal distribution of privileges or rights among groups that are conceptualized as racially or ethnically different. These can take the form of social actions, practices, beliefs, or political systems (e.g., apartheid) that consider different races to be ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities. It may also hold that members of different races should be treated differently. Some variants include a belief in hierarchies of worth arising from biological differences between peoples.

Among the questions of how to define racism is whether to include forms of discrimination that are unintentional, such as making assumptions about preferences or abilities of others based on racial stereotypes, whether to include symbolic or institutionalized forms of discrimination such as the circulation of ethnic stereotypes through the media, or whether to include the sociopolitical dynamics of social stratification that sometimes have a racial component. Racism can also lead to racial bias and employment discrimination.

Race card

Playing the race card is an idiomatic phrase that refers to exploitation of either racist or anti-racist attitudes by accusing others of racism.

Usage

The phrase is commonly used to allege that someone has deliberately and falsely accused another person of being a racist in order to gain some sort of advantage. An example of this use of the term occurred during the O. J. Simpson murder trial, when critics accused the defense of "playing the race card" in presenting Mark Fuhrman's past (e.g., his recorded use of the word "nigger" in addition to his being accused of tampering with murder evidence in prior cases, as well as his use of the Fifth Amendment to avoid potential self-incrimination upon questioning) as a reason to draw his credibility as a witness into question.

Stanford professor Richard Thompson Ford has argued that the race card can be played independent of the person making the claim, or the race in question. An example cited was the Hillary Clinton campaign claiming that Obama won the 2008 Democratic Primary in South Carolina due to the disproportionate number of black registered Democrats in the state, implying more racism in the general population.