this is still a potent force in the mass cultures of Western societies, and from all
available evidence racism of this type is at least as strong in the former Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe.
Why and how particular groups become the targets of racial hatred and
discriminatory behaviour from time to time is unclear. The social science
theories that attempt to deal with it, often as a subcategory of a general problem
of ethnicity in politics, are unsatisfactory. It is a natural problem forMarxism, as
racial groupings seldom fit neatly into the expected lines of class conflict, and the
tendency is for Marxists to see racism as afalse consciousnessdeliberately or
otherwise implanted into the masses to divert them from seeing their common
brotherhood as workers facing the true class enemy. But non-Marxist social
scientists have no more convincing an approach, and ultimately tend to assume
that racism, as a form of xenophobia, rises from social strains, especially in
contexts where there is considerable status-anxiety.
The extent of the hatred of others because of surface and visible physical
differences is hard to estimate, but is certainly surprisingly widespread. The
idea that there is some natural antipathy between white and non-white, or that
only ‘caucasians’ indulge in racist feelings, is palpably false. Much of thecaste
system in India, for example, rests on the racial distinction between the original
Tamil inhabitants and the ‘Aryan’ invaders from the north over 3,000 years ago.
The Chinese are often reported to be clearly racist in their attitudes to whites in
a way that transcends mere ideological opposition to capitalists. A form of
reciprocal racism has developed in some societies where racial minorities
discriminated against by whites not only develop a defensive racist intolerance
of the oppressors, but also of other minorities. Thus, for example, some
American black leaders are openly anti-Semitic.
Radical
Radical, as a political epithet, has two general meanings, though purists may
wish to insist only on its primary derivation. This, from the Latinradix(root),
means anyone who advocates far reaching and fundamental change in a
political system. Literally, a radical is one who proposes to attack some political
or social problem by going deep into the socio-economic fabric to get at the
fundamental or root cause and alter this basic social weakness. As such it can be
contrasted with a more ‘symptomatic’ policy cure. For example, the problem
of crime could be dealt with by a reform of policing tactics, or it could be seen
as resulting from very basic economic and socializing forces. To attack crime
rates by changing the latter would be a ‘radical’ approach; to try to deal with
crime either by severe penal sanctions, or by intensive ‘community policing’,
might be more or less politically extreme, but would not be radical. It is
Radical