Racism

Racism is the belief that some groups of people are better than others because of things like their skin color or where their families come from. It can also mean treating people unfairly or badly just because they look different or have different traditions. Many times, these ideas come from wrong thoughts about biology, even though scientists have shown these ideas are not true.

Race and ethnicity are sometimes used to talk about the same things, but they really mean different things. The United Nations says that no one group is better than another, and that treating people differently because of their race or ethnicity is always wrong.

Racism became stronger during times when European countries were exploring and taking control of other parts of the world. It helped drive big harmful actions like the Atlantic slave trade and racial segregation in the United States. Sadly, racism has also been a part of terrible events like genocides, where whole groups of people were hurt or killed because of who they were. Indigenous peoples have often faced unfair and hurtful treatment because of racist beliefs.

Etymology, definition, and usage

In the 1800s, many scientists thought people could be divided into different groups called races. The word racism describes the belief that people can be split into races with different abilities, and that some races are better than others. This belief can lead people to treat others unfairly because of their background.

Most experts in biology, anthropology, and sociology say that race is not a real way to split people up. They think we should look at things like where people come from or their culture instead. Research on genes shows that race is not a real way to group humans.

By the end of World War II, the word racism came to mean treating people badly because of their race. Today, many people talk about different kinds of racism that have appeared in different times and places. Some say racism includes three main parts: power differences between groups, ideas about racial differences, and unfair actions.

Aspects

The ideology behind racism can show up in many parts of daily life. Racism is when people think others are better or worse just because of their background. This can lead to unfair treatment and hurt feelings.

Aversive racism

Main article: Aversive racism

Aversive racism is a hidden kind of racism. It happens when people feel bad about others from different backgrounds without realizing it. They might act differently around people who aren't like them, even if they say they believe everyone should be treated the same. This change in behavior is usually unconscious.

Color blindness

Main article: Color blindness (race)

Color blindness in racism means ignoring someone's background when interacting with them. Some people think this helps, but others believe it can hide real problems and make inequality worse. By pretending race doesn't matter, important issues might get ignored.

Cultural

See also: Cultural racism and Xenophobia

Cultural racism happens when people believe their own culture is better than others. This can include language, traditions, and customs. It's similar to fearing or disliking people from different groups.

Economic

Further information: Criticism of capitalism § Racism, Racial pay gap in the United States, and Racial wealth gap in the United States

Economic differences caused by history can lead to ongoing unfairness. Past racism affects education and opportunities today. Some systems may unintentionally keep these gaps wide because of unconscious biases.

Institutional

Institutional racism is when big groups like governments or companies treat people unfairly because of their background. This type of racism is built into systems and policies, affecting many people over time.

Othering

Main article: Othering

Othering is when people treat a group as different or not normal. This helps keep racism going by making some people seem like outsiders. It often involves assuming differences that aren't really true.

Racial discrimination

Main article: Racial discrimination

Racial discrimination means treating someone unfairly just because of their race.

Racial segregation

Main article: Racial segregation

Racial segregation is when people are separated into different groups in everyday life. This can happen in schools, restaurants, or neighborhoods. Even when it's not the law, some people might still prefer it.

Reverse racism

Reverse racism is a term some use for unfair treatment of people in powerful groups or favoring minority groups. Not everyone agrees that this is real racism because minority groups usually don't have the power to oppress others widely.

Supremacism

Main article: Supremacism

Supremacism is the belief that one group is better than others. History shows examples where people thought they were superior, leading to harmful actions against others. Different groups have claimed superiority at different times.

Symbolic/modern

Main article: Symbolic racism

Some believe that older, open forms of racism have changed into more hidden ways. People might seem fair but still hold unfair views inside. They might treat others differently without admitting it, often based on stereotypes.

Subconscious biases

Main article: Implicit bias § Racial bias

Research shows that even people who say they aren't racist might still have hidden biases that affect their decisions. These unconscious biases can lead to unfair treatment, though they aren't as strong as open racism.

International law and racial discrimination

In 1919, there was a plan to add a rule about treating all people equally no matter their background to a big agreement among countries, but it wasn’t used. Later, in 1945, an important worldwide group made it one of their goals to respect everyone’s rights equally, no matter their background.

In 1950, a group of scientists and thinkers said we should stop using the word “race” and talk instead about different ethnic groups. They wanted to show that ideas about certain groups being better than others were wrong and unfair. Their work helped change laws in many places to treat everyone fairly.

In 1966, a worldwide agreement was made to stop any rules or actions that treat people unfairly because of their race, color, or where they come from. This agreement helps make sure everyone has the same rights. In 2001, European countries also agreed to ban unfair treatment of people based on their background or other personal traits.

Ideology

Racism began in the 1800s when some people tried to sort humans into groups based on things like skin color. They thought certain groups were better than others. For example, one person named Christoph Meiners said that only white people were beautiful and that other groups were not as good.

Later, people realized these ideas were wrong. After World War II, many agreed that treating people differently because of their race or background was unfair and harmful. Even so, racism and unfair treatment based on race still happen in many places today. Some people now focus more on culture and shared history when talking about groups of people, rather than just physical looks.

Main article: scientific racism
Main articles: racial discrimination, Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination

Ethnicity and ethnic conflicts

Further information: Ethnicity

Debates about where racism comes from often get confusing because people use the word in different ways. Some talk about racism when they mean xenophobia or ethnocentrism, which are ways people might feel uneasy or unfriendly toward others who look or act different. Scholars try to keep these ideas separate from racism as a belief system or from old ideas about race that aren’t scientific.

Sometimes, fights between groups that share a common culture or history happen because they want the same land or resources. For example, when groups see each other as very different — like one group calling themselves “us” and the other “them” — they might fight harder and feel less need to be fair or kind.

Notions about race and racism have often been important in conflicts between ethnic groups. When one side thinks they are better because of their race or ethnicity, they may try harder to take land, slaves, or wealth from the other side, sometimes using very harsh methods.

Historically, racism has been a big part of some very sad events. It helped drive the slave trade and supported unfair laws that kept people separated by race, like in the United States and in South Africa under apartheid. Racism has also been linked to terrible events where whole groups of people were harmed, such as in the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. Many places around the world have struggled with racist ideas, and these practices are opposed by international agreements like the Declaration of Human Rights.

Ethnic and racial nationalism

Further information: Ethnic nationalism, Racial nationalism, and Romantic nationalism

After big wars in Europe, new ideas about countries and who belonged in them started to grow. As countries formed, some people began to believe that only certain groups — based on family history or shared language — truly belonged in a nation. This idea is called ethnic nationalism.

One big influence on this idea came from writers and thinkers in the 1800s who felt strongly about their own cultural groups. In Germany, for example, some believed that their group was naturally better than others and should control large areas. These ideas mixed with beliefs about race and led some to think that certain groups were “master races” meant to lead others.

These beliefs were not just in Germany. In France, arguments about who truly belonged in the country grew during a famous disagreement over a military officer named Alfred Dreyfus. The debate split the country and showed how strong feelings about national identity could become. Some people even talked about certain groups — like Jewish people, Protestants, or foreigners — as threats to the country’s unity.

History

"History of racism" redirects here. For racism concept in history, see historical race concepts.

Ethnocentrism and proto-racism

Aristotle

Bernard Lewis has cited the Greek philosopher Aristotle who, in his discussion of slavery, stated that while Greeks are free by nature, "barbarians" (non-Greeks) are slaves by nature, in that it is in their nature to be more willing to submit to a despotic government. Though Aristotle does not specify any particular races, he argues that people from nations outside Greece are more prone to the burden of slavery than those from Greece. While Aristotle makes remarks about the most natural slaves being those with strong bodies and slave souls (unfit for rule, unintelligent) which would seem to imply a physical basis for discrimination, he also explicitly states that the right kind of souls and bodies do not always go together, implying that the greatest determinate for inferiority and natural slaves versus natural masters is the soul, not the body. The modern version of racism based on the idea of hereditary inferiority had not yet been developed, and Aristotle never explicitly stated whether he believed the supposed natural inferiority of Barbarians was caused by environment and climate (like many of his contemporaries) or by birth.

Historian Dante A. Puzzo, in his discussion of Aristotle, racism, and the ancient world writes that:

Racism rests on two basic assumptions: that a correlation exists between physical characteristics and moral qualities; that mankind is divisible into superior and inferior stocks. Racism, thus defined, is a modern conception, for prior to the XVIth century there was virtually nothing in the life and thought of the West that can be described as racist. To prevent misunderstanding a clear distinction must be made between racism and ethnocentrism ... The Ancient Hebrews, in referring to all who were not Hebrews as Gentiles, were indulging in ethnocentrism, not in racism. ... So it was with the Hellenes who denominated all non-Hellenes—whether the wild Scythians or the Egyptians whom they acknowledged as their mentors in the arts of civilization—Barbarians, the term denoting that which was strange or foreign.

Early antisemitism

Some scholars suggest that anti-Jewish policies under the Hellenistic empires and the Roman Empire constitute examples of ancient racism. Other scholars have criticized this view as based on an ahistorical conception of race, and argued that such policies were aimed at repressing a religious group resistant to imperialism and conformity rather than a racialized entity.

Medieval Arab writers

See also: Medieval Arab attitudes to Black people

Bernard Lewis has also cited historians and geographers of the Middle East and North Africa region, including Al-Muqaddasi, Al-Jahiz, Al-Masudi, Abu Rayhan Biruni, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, and Ibn Qutaybah. Though the Qur'an expresses no racial prejudice, Lewis argues that ethnocentric prejudice later developed among Arabs, for a variety of reasons: their extensive conquests and slave trade; the influence of Aristotelian ideas regarding slavery, which some Muslim philosophers directed towards Zanj (Bantu) and Turkic peoples; and the influence of Judeo-Christian ideas regarding divisions among humankind. By the eighth century, anti-black prejudice among Arabs resulted in discrimination. A number of medieval Arabic authors argued against this prejudice, urging respect for all black people and especially Ethiopians. Notable Islamic caliphs with Sub-Saharan ancestry include Abu al-Misk Kafur Al-Mustansir Billah, Yaqub al-Mansur, Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Othman, Sultan of the Marinid dynasty and Moulay Ismail Ibn Sharif.

By the 14th century, a significant number of slaves came from sub-Saharan Africa; Lewis argues that this led to the likes of Egyptian historian Al-Abshibi (1388–1446) writing that "[i]t is said that when the [black] slave is sated, he fornicates, when he is hungry, he steals." According to Lewis, the 14th-century Tunisian scholar Ibn Khaldun also wrote:

...beyond [known peoples of black West Africa] to the south there is no civilization in the proper sense. There are only humans who are closer to dumb animals than to rational beings. They live in thickets and caves, and eat herbs and unprepared grain. They frequently eat each other. They cannot be considered human beings. Therefore, the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because (Negroes) have little that is (essentially) human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals, as we have stated.

According to Wesleyan University professor Abdelmajid Hannoum, French Orientalists projected racist and colonialist views of the 19th century into their translations of medieval Arabic writings, including those of Ibn Khaldun. This resulted in the translated texts racializing Arabs and Berber people, when no such distinction was made in the originals. James E. Lindsay argues that the concept of an Arab identity itself did not exist until modern times, though others like Robert Hoyland have argued that a common sense of Arab identity already existed by the 9th century.

Limpieza de sangre

Further information: Limpieza de sangre

With the Umayyad Caliphate's conquest of Hispania, Muslim Arabs and Berbers overthrew the previous Visigothic rulers and created Al-Andalus, which contributed to the Golden age of Jewish culture, and lasted for six centuries. It was followed by the centuries-long Reconquista, during which Christian Iberian kingdoms contested Al-Andalus and progressively conquered the divided Muslim kingdoms, culminating in the fall of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada in 1492 and the rise of Ferdinand V and Isabella I as Catholic monarchs of Spain. The legacy Catholic Spaniards then formulated the limpieza de sangre ("cleanliness of blood") doctrine. It was during this time in history that the Western concept of aristocratic "blue blood" emerged in a racialized, religious and feudal context, so as to stem the upward social mobility of the converted New Christians. Robert Lacey explains:

It was the Spaniards who gave the world the notion that an aristocrat's blood is not red but blue. The Spanish nobility started taking shape around the ninth century in classic military fashion, occupying land as warriors on horseback. They were to continue the process for more than five hundred years, clawing back sections of the peninsula from its Moorish occupiers, and a nobleman demonstrated his pedigree by holding up his sword arm to display the filigree of blue-blooded veins beneath his pale skin—proof that his birth had not been contaminated by the dark-skinned enemy. Sangre azul, blue blood, was thus a euphemism for being a white man—Spain's own particular reminder that the refined footsteps of the aristocracy through history carry the rather less refined spoor of racism.

Following the expulsion of the Arabic Moors and most of the Sephardic Jews from the Iberian peninsula, the remaining Jews and Muslims were forced to convert to Roman Catholicism, becoming "New Christians", who were sometimes discriminated against by the "Old Christians" in some cities (including Toledo), despite condemnations by the Church and the State, which both welcomed the new flock. The Inquisition was carried out by members of the Dominican Order in order to weed out the converts who still practiced Judaism and Islam in secret. The system and ideology of the limpieza de sangre ostracized false Christian converts from society in order to protect it against treason. The remnants of such legislation persevered into the 19th century in military contexts.

In Portugal, the legal distinction between New and Old Christian was only ended through a legal decree issued by the Marquis of Pombal in 1772, almost three centuries after the implementation of the racist discrimination. The limpieza de sangre legislation was common also during the colonization of the Americas, where it led to the racial and feudal separation of peoples and social strata in the colonies. It was however often ignored in practice, as the new colonies needed skilled people.

At the end of the Renaissance, the Valladolid debate (1550–1551), concerning the treatment of the natives of the "New World" pitted the Dominican friar and Bishop of Chiapas, Bartolomé de Las Casas, to another Dominican and Humanist philosopher, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. The latter argued that the Indians practiced human sacrifice of innocents, cannibalism, and other such "crimes against nature"; they were unacceptable and should be suppressed by any means possible including war, thus reducing them to slavery or serfdom was in accordance with Catholic theology and natural law. To the contrary, Bartolomé de Las Casas argued that the Amerindians were free men in the natural order and deserved the same treatment as others, according to Catholic theology. It was one of the many controversies concerning racism, slavery, religion, and European morality that would arise in the following centuries and which resulted in the legislation protecting the natives. The marriage between Luisa de Abrego, a free black domestic servant from Seville and Miguel Rodríguez, a white segovian conquistador in 1565 in St. Augustine (Spanish Florida), is the first known and recorded Christian marriage anywhere in the continental United States.

In the Spanish colonies, Spaniards developed a complex caste system based on race, which was used for social control, and which also determined a person's importance in society. While many Latin American countries have long since rendered the system officially illegal through legislation, usually at the time of their independence, prejudice based on degrees of perceived racial distance from European ancestry combined with one's socioeconomic status remain, an echo of the colonial caste system.

Racism as a modern phenomenon

Racism is frequently described as a modern phenomenon. In the view of the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, the first formulation of racism emerged in the Early Modern period as the "discourse of race struggle", and a historical and political discourse, which Foucault opposed to the philosophical and juridical discourse of sovereignty.

This European discourse, which first appeared in Great Britain, was then carried on in France by such people as Boulainvilliers (1658–1722), Nicolas Fréret (1688–1749), and then, during the 1789 French Revolution, Sieyès, and afterwards, Augustin Thierry and Cournot. Boulainvilliers, who created the matrix of such racist discourse in France, conceived of the "race" as being something closer to the sense of a "nation", that is, in his time, the "race" meant the "people".

He conceived of France as being divided between various nations—the unified nation-state is an anachronism here—which themselves formed different "races". Boulainvilliers opposed the absolute monarchy, which tried to bypass the aristocracy by establishing a direct relationship to the Third Estate. Thus, he developed the theory that the French aristocrats were the descendants of foreign invaders, whom he called the "Franks", while according to him, the Third Estate constituted the autochthonous, vanquished Gallo-Romans, who were dominated by the Frankish aristocracy as a consequence of the right of conquest. Early modern racism was opposed to nationalism and the nation-state: the Comte de Montlosier, in exile during the French Revolution, who borrowed Boulainvilliers' discourse on the "Nordic race" as being the French aristocracy that invaded the plebeian "Gauls", thus showed his contempt for the Third Estate, calling it "this new people born of slaves ... mixture of all races and of all times".

19th century

While 19th-century racism became closely intertwined with nationalism, leading to the ethnic nationalist discourse that identified the "race" with the "folk", leading to such movements as pan-Germanism, pan-Turkism, pan-Arabism, and pan-Slavism, medieval racism precisely divided the nation into various non-biological "races", which were thought to be the consequence of historical conquests and social conflicts. Michel Foucault traced the genealogy of modern racism to this medieval "historical and political discourse of race struggle". According to him, it divided itself in the 19th century according to two rival lines: on one hand, it was incorporated by racists, biologists and eugenicists, who gave it the modern sense of "race", and they also transformed this popular discourse into a "state racism" (e.g., Nazism). On the other hand, Marxism also seized this discourse founded on the assumption of a political struggle that provided the real engine of history and continued to act underneath the apparent peace. Thus, Marxists transformed the essentialist notion of "race" into the historical notion of "class struggle", defined by socially structured positions: capitalist or proletarian. In The Will to Knowledge (1976), Foucault analyzed another opponent of the "race struggle" discourse: Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis, which opposed the concept of "blood heredity", prevalent in the 19th century racist discourse.

Authors such as Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, have said that the racist ideology (popular racism) which developed at the end of the 19th century helped legitimize the imperialist conquests of foreign territories and the atrocities that sometimes accompanied them (such as the Herero and Nama genocide of 1904–1908 or the Armenian genocide of 1915–1917). Rudyard Kipling's poem, The White Man's Burden (1899), is one of the more famous illustrations of the belief in the inherent superiority of the European culture over the rest of the world, though it is also thought to be a satirical appraisal of such imperialism. Racist ideology thus helped legitimize the conquest and incorporation of foreign territories into an empire, which were regarded as a humanitarian obligation partially as a result of these racist beliefs.

However, during the 19th century, Western European colonial powers were involved in the suppression of the Arab slave trade in Africa, as well as in the suppression of the slave trade in West Africa. Some Europeans during the time period objected to injustices that occurred in some colonies and lobbied on behalf of aboriginal peoples. Thus, when the Hottentot Venus was displayed in England in the beginning of the 19th century, the African Association publicly opposed itself to the exhibition. The same year that Kipling published his poem, Joseph Conrad published Heart of Darkness (1899), a clear criticism of the Congo Free State, which was owned by Leopold II of Belgium.

Examples of racial theories used include the creation of the Hamitic theory during the European exploration of Africa. The term Hamite was applied to different populations within North Africa, mainly comprising Ethiopians, Eritreans, Somalis, Berbers, and the ancient Egyptians. Hamites were regarded as Caucasoid peoples who probably originated in either Arabia or Asia on the basis of their cultural, physical and linguistic similarities with the peoples of those areas. Europeans considered Hamites to be more civilized than Sub-Saharan Africans, and more akin to themselves and Semitic peoples. In the first two-thirds of the 20th century, the Hamitic race was, in fact, considered one of the branches of the Caucasian race, along with the Indo-Europeans, Semites, and the Mediterraneans.

However, the Hamitic peoples themselves were often deemed to have failed as rulers, which was usually ascribed to interbreeding with Negroes. In the mid-20th century, the German scholar Carl Meinhof (1857–1944) claimed that the Bantu race was formed by a merger of Hamitic and Negro races. The Hottentots (Nama or Khoi) were formed by the merger of Hamitic and Bushmen (San) races—both being termed nowadays as Khoisan peoples.

In the United States in the early 19th century, the American Colonization Society was established as the primary vehicle for proposals to return black Americans to greater freedom and equality in Africa. The colonization effort resulted from a mixture of motives with its founder Henry Clay stating that "unconquerable prejudice resulting from their color, they never could amalgamate with the free whites of this country. It was desirable, therefore, as it respected them, and the residue of the population of the country, to drain them off". Racism spread throughout the New World in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Whitecapping, which started in Indiana in the late 19th century, soon spread throughout all of North America, causing many African laborers to flee from the land they worked on. In the US, during the 1860s, racist posters were used during election campaigns. In one of these racist posters (see above), a black man is depicted lounging idly in the foreground as one white man ploughs his field and another chops wood. Accompanying labels are: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread", and "The white man must work to keep his children and pay his taxes." The black man wonders, "Whar is de use for me to work as long as dey make dese appropriations." Above in a cloud is an image of the "Freedman's Bureau! Negro Estimate of Freedom!" The bureau is pictured as a large domed building resembling the U.S. Capitol and is inscribed "Freedom and No Work". Its columns and walls are labeled, "Candy", "Rum, Gin, Whiskey", "Sugar Plums", "Indolence", "White Women", "Apathy", "White Sugar", "Idleness", and so on.

On 5 June 1873, Sir Francis Galton, distinguished English explorer and cousin of Charles Darwin, wrote in a letter to The Times:

My proposal is to make the encouragement of Chinese settlements of Africa a part of our national policy, in the belief that the Chinese immigrants would not only maintain their position, but that they would multiply and their descendants supplant the inferior Negro race ... I should expect that the African seaboard, now sparsely occupied by lazy, palavering savages, might in a few years be tenanted by industrious, order-loving Chinese, living either as a semidetached dependency of China, or else in perfect freedom under their own law.

20th century

Further information: Racial policy of Nazi Germany, Holocaust, Forced settlements in the Soviet Union, Apartheid, Racial segregation in the United States, and Rwandan genocide

The Nazi party, which seized power in the 1933 German elections and maintained a dictatorship over much of Europe until the End of World War II on the European continent, deemed the Germans to be part of an Aryan "master race" (Herrenvolk), who therefore had the right to expand their territory and enslave or kill members of other races deemed inferior.

Adolf Hitler's 1925 memoir Mein Kampf was full of admiration for America's treatment of "coloreds". Nazi praise for America's institutional racism was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and Nazi lawyers were advocates of the use of American models. Race-based U.S. citizenship laws and anti-miscegenation laws (no race mixing) directly inspired the Nazi's two principal Nuremberg racial laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Nazi expansion eastward was accompanied with invocation of America's colonial expansion westward, with the accompanying actions toward the Native Americans. In 1928, Hitler praised Americans for having "gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keeps the modest remnant under observation in a cage." On Nazi Germany's expansion eastward, in 1941 Hitler stated, "Our Mississippi [the line beyond which Thomas Jefferson wanted all Indians expelled] must be the Volga."

The racial ideology conceived by the Nazis graded humans on a scale of pure Aryan to non-Aryan, with the latter viewed as subhuman. At the top of the scale of pure Aryans were Germans and other Germanic peoples including the Dutch, Scandinavians, and the English as well as other peoples such as some northern Italians and the French, who were said to have a suitable admixture of Germanic blood. Nazi policies labeled Romani people, people of color, and Slavs (mainly Poles, Serbs, Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians and Czechs) as inferior non-Aryan subhumans. Jews were at the bottom of the hierarchy, considered inhuman and thus unworthy of life. In accordance with Nazi racial ideology, approximately six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. 2.5 million ethnic Poles, 0.5 million ethnic Serbs and 0.2–0.5 million Romani were killed by the regime and its collaborators.

The Nazis considered most Slavs to be non-Aryan Untermenschen. The Nazi Party's chief racial theorist, Alfred Rosenberg, adopted the term from Klansman Lothrop Stoddard's 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man. In the secret plan Generalplan Ost ("Master Plan East") the Nazis resolved to expel, enslave, or exterminate most Slavic people to provide "living space" for Germans, but Nazi policy towards Slavs changed during World War II due to manpower shortages which necessitated limited Slavic participation in the Waffen-SS. Significant war crimes were committed against Slavs, particularly Poles, and Soviet POWs had a far higher mortality rate than their American and British counterparts due to deliberate neglect and mistreatment. Between June 1941 and January 1942, the Nazis killed an estimated 2.8 million Red Army POWs, whom they viewed as "subhuman".

In the years 1943–1945, around 120,000 Polish people, mostly women and children, became the victims of ethnicity-based massacres by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which was then operating in the territory of occupied Poland. In addition to Poles who represented the vast majority of the murdered people, the victims also included Jews, Armenians, Russians, and Ukrainians who were married to Poles or attempted to help them.

During the intensification of ties with Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Ante Pavelić and the Ustaše and their idea of the Croatian nation became increasingly race-oriented. The Ustaše view of national and racial identity, as well as the theory of Serbs as an inferior race, was influenced by Croatian nationalists and intellectuals from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Serbs were primary targets of racial laws and murders in the puppet Independent State of Croatia (NDH); Jews and Roma were also targeted. The Ustaše introduced laws to strip Serbs of their citizenship, livelihoods, and possessions. During the genocide in the NDH, Serbs suffered among the highest casualty rates in Europe during the World War II, and the NDH was one of the most lethal regimes in the 20th century.

A drinking fountain from the mid-20th century labelled "Colored" with an African-American man drinking

A sign posted above a bar that reads "No beer sold to Indians [Native Americans]". Birney, Montana, 1941.

White supremacy was dominant in the U.S. from its founding up to the civil rights movement. On the U.S. immigration laws prior to 1965, sociologist Stephen Klineberg cited the law as clearly declaring "that Northern Europeans are a superior subspecies of the white race." While anti-Asian racism was embedded in U.S. politics and culture in the early 20th century, Indians were also racialized for their anticolonialism, with U.S. officials, casting them as a "Hindu" menace, pushing for Western imperial expansion abroad. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U.S. citizenship to whites only, and in the 1923 case, United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, the Supreme Court ruled that high caste Hindus were not "white persons" and were therefore racially ineligible for naturalized citizenship. It was after the Luce–Celler Act of 1946 that a quota of 100 Indians per year could immigrate to the U.S. and become citizens. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 dramatically opened entry to the U.S. to immigrants other than traditional Northern European and Germanic groups, and as a result would significantly alter the demographic mix in the U.S.

Serious race riots in Durban between Indians and Zulus erupted in 1949. Ne Win's rise to power in Burma in 1962 and his relentless persecution of "resident aliens" led to an exodus of some 300,000 Burmese Indians. They migrated to escape racial discrimination and wholesale nationalisation of private enterprises a few years later, in 1964. The Zanzibar Revolution of 12 January 1964, put an end to the local Arab dynasty. Thousands of Arabs and Indians in Zanzibar were massacred in riots, and thousands more were detained or fled the island. In August 1972, Ugandan President Idi Amin started the expropriation of properties owned by Asians and Europeans. In the same year, Amin ethnically cleansed Uganda's Asians, giving them 90 days to leave the country. Shortly after World War II, the South African National Party took control of the government in South Africa. Between 1948 and 1994, the apartheid regime took place. This regime based its ideology on the racial separation of whites and non-whites, including the unequal rights of non-whites. Several protests and violence occurred during the struggle against apartheid, the most famous of these include the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, the Soweto uprising in 1976, the Church Street bombing of 1983, and the Cape Town peace march of 1989.

Contemporary

During the Congo Civil War (1998–2003), Pygmy people were hunted down like game animals and eaten. Both sides in the war regarded them as "subhuman" and some say their flesh can confer magical powers. UN human rights activists reported in 2003 that rebels had carried out acts of cannibalism. Sinafasi Makelo, a representative of the Mbuti pygmies, has asked the UN Security Council to recognise cannibalism as both a crime against humanity and an act of genocide. A report released by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination condemns Botswana's treatment of the 'Bushmen' as racist. In 2008, the tribunal of the 15-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC) accused Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe of having a racist attitude towards white people.

The mass demonstrations and riots against African students in Nanjing, China, lasted from December 1988 to January 1989. In November 2009, British newspaper The Guardian reported that Lou Jing, of mixed Chinese and African parentage, had emerged as the most famous talent show contestant in China and has become the subject of intense debate because of her skin color. Her attention in the media opened serious debates about racism in China and racial prejudice.

Some 70,000 black African Mauritanians were expelled from Mauritania in the late 1980s. In the Sudan, black African captives in the civil war were often enslaved, and female prisoners were often sexually abused. The Darfur conflict has been described by some as a racial matter. In October 2006, Niger announced that it would deport the approximately 150,000 Arabs living in the Diffa region of eastern Niger to Chad. While the government collected Arabs in preparation for the deportation, two girls died, reportedly after fleeing Government forces, and three women suffered miscarriages.

The Jakarta riots of May 1998 targeted many Chinese Indonesians. The anti-Chinese legislation was in the Indonesian constitution until 1998. Resentment against Chinese workers has led to violent confrontations in Africa and Oceania. Anti-Chinese rioting, involving tens of thousands of people, broke out in Papua New Guinea in May 2009. Indo-Fijians suffered violent attacks after the Fiji coup in 2000. Non-indigenous citizens of Fiji are subject to discrimination. Racial divisions also exist in Guyana, Malaysia, Trinidad and Tobago, Madagascar, and South Africa. In Malaysia such racist state policies are codified on many levels, see Bumiputera.

Peter Bouckaert, the Human Rights Watch's emergencies director, said in an interview that "racist hatred" is the chief motivation behind the violence against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

One form of racism in the United States was enforced racial segregation, which existed until the 1960s, when it was outlawed in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It has been argued that this separation of races continues to exist de facto today in different forms, such as lack of access to loans and resources or discrimination by police and other government officials.

The 2016 Pew Research poll found that Italians, in particular, hold strong anti-Romani views, with 82% of Italians expressing negative opinions about Romani. In Greece, there are 67%, in Hungary, 64%, in France, 61%, in Spain, 49%, in Poland, 47%, in the UK, 45%, in Sweden, 42%, in Germany, 40%, and in the Netherlands, 37%, that have an unfavourable view of Roma. A survey conducted by Harvard University found the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine had the strongest racial bias against black people in Europe, while Serbia, Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina had the weakest racial bias, followed by Croatia and Ireland.

A 2023 University of Cambridge survey which featured the largest sample of Black people in Britain found that 88% had reported racial discrimination at work, 79% believed the police unfairly targeted black people with stop and search powers and 80% definitely or somewhat agreed that the biggest barrier to academic attainment for young Black students was racial discrimination in education.

Scientific racism

Main article: Scientific racism

Further information: Unilineal evolution

The idea of "scientific racism" started in the 1800s. It used science to support unfair beliefs about different groups of people. These ideas grew stronger during a time when many countries were exploring and taking control of other parts of the world.

Some scientists thought certain groups were better than others based on physical features. They used old ideas about how societies develop and a phrase called "survival of the fittest" to support their views. Even Charles Darwin, who talked about all humans being part of the same species, was used by some to back these unfair ideas.

Later, these wrong ideas mixed with thoughts about improving human families through careful planning of who has children. Scientists measured people’s heads and bodies to try to prove unfair beliefs. But we now know these ideas are wrong. Modern science shows all humans are very similar, and there is no real genetic reason to treat any group as better than another.

Heredity and eugenics

Further information: Eugenics

Early ideas about planning families to improve people came in the 1800s. Some scientists thought certain traits, like intelligence, could be passed down. These ideas were used to support unfair treatments of people.

During a difficult time in history, some scientists tried to fight against unfair racial ideas, but many still supported them. After big events in history, scientists began to reject these old and wrong theories.

Polygenism and racial typologies

Further information: Polygenism, Typology (anthropology), and Nordicism

Some writers in the 1800s tried to divide people into different groups based on what they looked like. They thought some groups were naturally better than others. These ideas were used to support unfair laws and treatments of people from different backgrounds.

Human zoos

In the past, some people were displayed in zoos like animals. This was done to show differences between groups of people, which helped spread unfair beliefs. These displays happened in many places around the world until the middle of the last century.

Theories about the origins of racism

See also: Ethnocentrism and Tribalism

Some scientists think that people might use race as a way to guess who is on "their side" or not, especially when they don’t know much about someone else. They did experiments where people looked at pictures and tried to remember who said what, and sometimes they mixed up people who looked similar, like the same race or wore similar clothes.

Other studies suggest that experiences during childhood, like having friends from different backgrounds, can affect how people see others later in life. Some research also links certain brain activities to how people react to others who look different from themselves.

Psychological causes

A study from 2017 in the American Political Science Review showed that some people have trouble understanding how others feel, especially those who are treated unfairly. When young adults in Hungary played a game that helped them see things from another person's point of view, they became less unfair toward others. This also made them less likely to support groups that treat people badly.

State-sponsored racism

Main articles: Nazism and race, Racial policy of Nazi Germany, Racial antisemitism, Eugenics in Showa Japan, Apartheid in South Africa, Racial segregation in the United States, Ketuanan Melayu, Anti-Chinese legislation in Indonesia, and White Australia policy

When a country's government supports unfair ideas about different groups of people, it is called state-sponsored racism. This has happened in many places throughout history. For example, in Nazi Germany, laws were made to treat people differently based on their background. These laws took away important rights from certain groups, making life very hard for them.

In South Africa, a system called Apartheid separated people by their skin color for many years. Laws decided who could vote, where they could live, and what services they could use, treating some people unfairly. These unfair laws were later changed to protect everyone's rights equally.

Anti-racism

Main articles: Anti-racism, Racial equality, Anti-fascism, Anti-imperialism, Anti-colonialism, and Multiracial democracy

Anti-racism means working against unfair treatment of people because of their race. It includes ideas, actions, learning, groups, and rules that try to stop racism. The goal is to create a world where everyone is treated equally, no matter their background. Examples of anti-racism include the civil rights movement, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and Black Lives Matter. Some groups work together peacefully, while others support rules like laws against unfair treatment and policies that help give everyone equal chances.