R

Racism

Racism is any political or social belief that justifies treating people differently
according to their racial origins. In fact, since the adoption ofaffirmative
actionpolicies in many countries to redress historical patterns ofdiscrimi-
nationby giving special advantages to people of certain races,ethnicity,
gender or other distinguishing characteristic, this definition cannot be taken
literally. Racist doctrines have existed in world history since the earliest
evidence, and have only been thought of as inherently wrong and scientifically
absurd since the second half of the 20th century. There is no reliable scientific
evidence at all for any form of inherent inferiority of any racial group, though
from time to time apparent evidence emerges. Thus in the 1970s some
psychologists claimed to be able to show that certain racial groups, for example
blacks in the USA and the Irish, systematically scored less well than other
groups in intelligence quotient (IQ) tests. Apart from other unreliabilities in
the testing, it is generally accepted that environmental factors, and the possible
cultural bias, of such tests can account for any apparent racial differences.
In fact, not only is there no evidence of racial inferiority, but the very notion
of racial types is scientifically at best obscure and at worst entire fiction. It is
sometimes hard to grasp just how crude the tests used for racial stereotyping in
those countries, notably South Africa (seeapartheid), which have operated a
formal racial segregation policy can be, and how much of the pseudo-science
that characterized Hitler’s theory of racial types (seeanti-Semitism) is still
taken seriously. Babies whose parentage is unknown can be characterized into
race categories on no more evidence than a microscopic examination of
whether a head-hair curls more than ‘normal’ for a white person.
There are really two different aspects to racism. One is a theory of innate
differences between racial types which is used or advocated by those who the
scale would show as superior in order to justify economic and political
inequality. The other, and much more common, is based on cultural differ-
entiation, and simply asserts that people of such and such a background are
‘different’, and should not be allowed equal competition for jobs or other
rewards with the indigenous members of the nation’s culture. Without doubt