Print
Email
Look It Up
AT A GLANCE
Racism
6 articles on Racism
Racism
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 1134 Includes: BibliographyPrior to the 1830s, in both the North and the South, the inferiority of black Americans was generally accepted as a given, a tacit assumption that was not strongly challenged. However, the development of immediate abolitionism after 1830 compelled the South in particular to articulate its racism more than it had done before. Rather than presuming white superiority, southerners had to prove it, and they had to defend the political and social status quo that supported the extremely institutionalized racism of slavery. As abolitionism escalated, racism became unambiguous, based not so much on customs and practices as on the “unquestionable fact” that blacks were in every way inferior. It was not long before southerners used slavery, black inferiority, and racism as mutually reinforcing constructs by claiming that slavery was a natural condition for blacks given their inferiority. In ...
Read full articleRacism
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 6448 Includes: Mythology of the “White Man.” | Nineteeth-Century Intensification. | Academic Rationalization. | Racism as a Life Experience. | Perpetuating Racism in New Forms. | Measuring Degrees of Blood. | Education. | Housing Discrimination. | Civil Rights “Enjoyed by White Citizens.” | Genetics, Intelligence Measurement, and Race. | Racism and the Cold War. | BibliographyRacism classifies human beings into distinct and differentially valued racial groups, which are assumed to indicate intelligence, moral character, work habits and skills, and cultural aptitudes and preferences for each or most individuals within a particular group. These characteristics are assumed to be hereditary, not merely the result of upbringing or opportunity. Racial classification, mostly on the basis of skin color, has often been relied upon to limit individuals to specific occupations, residential areas, and levels of education, to confine marriages within assumed racial categories, to deny certain people full participation as citizens, or even to define some humans as nonhuman. In theory, racism can mean that separate development in distinct communities is good for each so-called race under discussion. In practice, people classified into differing races do not live in economic, political, and social isolation from one another. Racism inevitably subordinates certain individuals—those who are consigned to one or more racial classifications deemed inferior—and exalts others, those of an ...
Read full articleRacism in Latin America and the Caribbean
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 22See Myth of Racial Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Interpretation. ...
Read full articleRacism
Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 1489an ideology that views “race” as a fundamental human category rooted in nature and sees some races as inherently inferior. Racism in America has functioned as a means by which the white majority asserted its superiority and rationalized its dominance over Native Americans, Asian Americans, and African Americans. In the Colonial Era, European settlers often expressed racist views toward the native population, reinforced by religious beliefs in the Indians' satanic nature and God's mandate to the colonists to conquer them. Racist assumptions continued thereafter to justify white appropriation of Indian lands and even campaigns of extermination.Racist ideas have long been directed against African Americans. When Africans were first brought to America, some historians argue, their treatment was roughly equivalent to that of white indentured servants. ...
Read full articleRacism
Source: Oxford Companion to Black British History
Word Count: 2384Racism is a long‐standing feature of human societies, but it has taken many different forms and been interpreted in many different ways in the course of history.
Theories of the origins and nature of ‘race’ ...1. Theorizing race and racism 2. Early British racisms 3. Colonialism and domestic racism in the colonial era 4. Racializing non‐whiteness 5. The situation at the start of the 21st century
Read full articleRacism
Source: The Oxford Companion to the Body
Word Count: 850According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term describes ‘the theory that distinctive human characteristics and abilities are determined by race’. The word itself is rather recent, probably going back only to the 1930s. There are two attitudes towards the concept of racism: one says that ‘racism’ is usefully applied only where it is derived from a perception of race and the ensuing fixation on ‘typical’ racial traits. In this sense ‘racism’ describes the racialist attitudes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, deriving from the merger of physical anthropologyund ethnography on the background of the idea of evolution. Another school has argued that racism consists in intentional practices and unintended processes or consequences of attitudes towards the ethnic ‘other’. According to this line of thought, it is not necessary to possess a ...
Read full article