Racism

An African-American man drinks out of the "colored only" water cooler at a racially segregated street car terminal in the United States in 1939.

Racism refers to various belief systems maintaining that humans can be separated into various groups based on physical attributes and that these groupings determine or influence cultural or individual achievement or the essential value of human beings. This can lead to hostility against individuals based on a perceived or ascribed "race."

The word "racism" appeared in the 1930s, both in the English language and in French. Racial prejudice often includes the belief that people of different races differ in aptitudes and abilities, such as intelligence, physical prowess, or virtue. Most individuals who subscribe to racial categories believe that different races can be placed on a ranked, hierarchical scale. By definition one who practices racism is known as a racist.

African American sociologist W.E.B. DuBois argued that racialism is the belief that differences between the races exist, be they biological, social, psychological, or in the realm of the soul. He defined racism as using a belief in racial differences to push forward the argument that one's particular race is superior to the others.

Racism can more narrowly refer to a system of oppression, such as institutional racism that is based on the idea of one race's superiority over others. Organizations and institutions that practice racism discriminate against and marginalize a class of people who share a common racial designation. The term "racism" is usually applied to the dominant group in a society, because it is that group which has the means to oppress others. However, "racism" readily applies to any individual or group(s), regardless of social status or dominance.

Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, "racism" has become a pejorative term, and identification of a group or person as racist is almost always controversial. A number of international treaties have sought to end racism. The United Nations uses a definition of racial discrimination laid out in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and adopted in 1966:

...any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life..

The European Union condemns multiple factors for discrimination, not the least of which is race: "Article 21 of the charter prohibits discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, color, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation and also discrimination on the grounds of nationality."[3]

History of Racism

Etymology

The term "racism" appeared in the 1930s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It was considered distinct from the "theories of race," which had existed for at least 100 years before that. In 1987, Pierre-André Taguieff revealed that "racism" and "racist" appeared in the French Larousse Dictionary in 1932, with "racist" being defined as "the name given to the German national-socialists, designating, rather than the sole Nazi Party (NSDAP), the whole of the völkisch movement. The word "racist" is also occasionally used in Edouard Drumont's anti-Semitic La Libre Parole or by Maurice Barrès concerning the "French race".

Origins of contemporary racism

The medieval discourse of "race struggle"

Although anti-Semitism has a long European history, racism itself is frequently described as a "modern" phenomenon. According to French intellectual Michel Foucault, the first formulation of racism emerged in the Middle Ages as the "discourse of race struggle," a historical and political discourse which Foucault differentiated from the philosophical and juridical discourse of sovereignty. According to Foucault, this first appearance of racism as a theoretical discourse (as opposed to xenophobia, which some might argue has existed in all places and times) may be found in Edward Coke or John Lilburne's work during Great Britain's Glorious Revolution of 1688.

However, this "discourse of race struggle," as interpreted by Foucault, must be distinguished from 19th century biological racism, also known as scientific racism. Indeed, this medieval discourse has many points of difference with modern racism. First of all, in this "discourse of race struggle," "race" is not considered a biological notion — which would divide humanity into biological groups — but as a historical notion. Moreover, sovereignty did not use this discourse: the bourgeoisie, the working-class, and the aristocracy used such rhetoric as a means of struggle against the monarchy. This discourse, which first appeared in Great Britain, was then carried on in France by people such as Boulainvilliers, Nicolas Fréret, and then, during the French Revolution, Sieyès, and afterward Augustin Thierry and Cournot. Boulainvilliers, which created the matrix of such racist discourse in medieval France, conceived the "race" as something closer to the sense of "nation", that is, in his times, "people". Hence, he conceived France as divided between various nations — the unified nation-state is, of course, here an anachronism — which themselves formed different "races". Boulainvilliers opposed the absolute monarchy, who tried to bypass the aristocracy by establishing a direct relationship to the Third Estate. Thus, he created this theory of the French aristocrats as being the descendents of foreign invaders, whom he called the "Franks", while the Third Estate constituted according to him the autochthonous, vanquished Gallo-Romans, whom were dominated by the Frankish aristocracy as a consequence of the right of conquest. Henceforth, medieval 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 despise for the Third Estate calling it "this new people born of slaves... mixture of all races and of all times". While 19th century racism is related to nationalism (some authors have opposed a "close nationalism", based on racism, etc., towards an "open nationalism", based on the universalist conception of the nation, etc.), medieval racism precisely divides the nation into various non-biological "races", which are the consequences of historical conquests and social conflicts.

19th century transformation of the medieval discourse

Michel Foucault thus traces 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, even more, transformed this popular discourse into a "state racism" (Nazism); on the other hand, Marxists also seized this discourse, transforming the essentialist notion of "race" into the historical notion of "class struggle", defined by socially structured position: capitalist or proletarian.

Thus, biological racism was invented in the 19th century. Arthur de Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-55) may be considered as one of the first theorization of this new racism, founded on a essentialist notion of race, and which would progressively ties itself to nationalism and to the state, creating this new form of nationalism which appeared in the New Imperialism period and, in France, in the midst of the Dreyfus Affair. Hannah Arendt has shown in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) the emergence of "continental imperialisms", i.e. pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism, both racist ideologies which would play a decisive role after the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Other famous authors include Edouard Drumont, an anti-Semitic French author; Vacher de Lapouge's "anthroposociology"; Herder, whom applied race to nationalist theory to develop militant ethnic nationalism; H.S. Chamberlain at the end of the 19th century (a British citizen whom naturalized himself as German because of his admiration for the "Aryan race"); Madison Grant, a renowned eugenicist, author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916)... Such authors posited the historical existence of national races such as German and French, branching from basal races supposed to have existed for millennia, such as the Aryan race, and believed political boundaries should mirror these supposed racial ones.

Ethnic conflicts

Debates over the origins of racism often suffer from a lack of clarity over the term. Many use the term "racism" to refer to more general phenomena, such as xenophobia and ethnocentrism. Scholars attempt to clearly distinguish those phenomena from racism as an ideology or from scientific racism, which has little to do with actual xenophobia.

Others conflate recent forms of racism with earlier forms of ethnic and national conflict. In most cases, ethno-national conflict conveys a struggle over land and strategic resources. In certain historical examples, ethnicity and nationalism were harnessed to rally combatants in wars between great religious empires (e.g. the Muslim Turks and the Catholic Austro-Hungarians).

Notions of race and racism often have played central roles in such ethnic conflicts. Historically, when an adversary was identified as "other" based on notions of race or ethnicity (particularly when "other" is construed as "inferior"), the means employed by the self-presumed "superior" party to appropriate territory, human chattel, or material wealth often have been more ruthless, more brutal, and less constrained by moral or ethical considerations.

One example of the brutalizing and dehumanizing effects of racism was the attempt to deliberately infect Native Americans with smallpox during Pontiac's Rebellion in 1763, itself a war intended to ethnically cleanse the "other" (Anglo-Americans) from Native American land; each side "othered" the other.

According to historian Daniel Richter, Pontiac's Rebellion introduced "the novel idea that all Native people were 'Indians,' that all Euro-Americans were 'Whites,' and that all on one side must unite to destroy the other" to both sides of the conflict.

In the Western world, racism evolved, encompassed the doctrine of white supremacy, and helped fuel the European exploration, conquest, and colonization of much of the rest of the world — especially after Christopher Columbus reached the Americas. Filmmaker Basil Davidson insists in his documentary, Africa: Different but Equal, that racism only recently surfaced—as late as the 1800’s, due to the need for a justification of slavery in the Americas.

Maintaining that Africans were "subhuman" was the only loophole in the prevalent ideal that "men are created equal" that would allow for the continuation of the Triangular Trade. Theories about "race" developed, allowing many to justify the differences in position and treatment of people whom they categorized as belonging to different races (see Eric Wolf's Europe and the People without History).

During the Valladolid controversy in the middle of the 16th century, people like Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda argued that the Native Americans were natural slaves because they had no "souls". In Asia, the Chinese and Japanese Empires were both strong colonial powers, with the Chinese making colonies and vassal states of much of East Asia throughout history and the Japanese doing the same in the 19th-20th centuries. In both cases, the Asian imperial powers believed they were ethnically and racially superior to their vassals and entitled to be their masters.

European Colonialism

Authors such as Hannah Arendt in her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, have pointed out how the racist ideology ("popular racism") developed at the end of the 19th century helped legitimize the imperialist conquests of foreign territories and crimes that accompanied it (such as the Herero and Namaqua Genocide in 1904-1907). French philosopher Auguste Comte's positivist ideology of necessary social progress as a consequence of scientific progress led many Europeans to believe in the inherent superiority of the "White Race" over non-whites. Rudyard Kipling's poem, The White Man's Burden (1899), serves as one of the most famous illustrations of this belief. Racist ideology thus helped legitimize subjugation, slavery, and the dismantling of the traditional societies of indigenous peoples. Racist rationalizations caused many people to consider such actions humanitarian obligations. Other colonialists recognized the depravity of their actions but persisted for personal gain. Some Europeans objected to the injustices caused by colonialism and lobbied on behalf of aboriginal peoples. Thus, when the so-called "Hottentot Venus" was displayed in England in the beginning of the 19th century, the African Association publicly opposed itself to this shameful exhibition. Moreover, the same year that Kipling published his poem, Joseph Conrad published Heart of Darkness (1899), a clear criticisms of the Congo Free State owned by Leopold II of Belgium.

Human zoos bolstered "popular racism" by connecting it to scientific racism: people of different races were both objects of public curiosity and of anthropology and anthropometry . Joice Heth, an African-American slave, was displayed by P.T. Barnum in 1836, a few years after the exhibition of Saartjie Bartman, the "Hottentot Venus". Such exhibitions became common in the New Imperialism period and remained so until World War II. Congolese pygmy Ota Benga was displayed in 1906 by eugenicist Madison Grant, head of the Bronx Zoo, as an attempt to illustrate the "missing link" between human being and the orangutan: thus, racism was tied to Darwinism, creating a social Darwinism ideology which tried to ground itself in Darwin's scientific discoveries. The 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition displayed Kanaks from New Caledonia . A "Congolese village" was on display as late as in the 1958 Brussels' World Fair.

Slavery in the United States

Contention over the morality and legality of the institution of slavery was one of the cardinal issues which led to the U.S. Civil War. The failed attempt at secession by the Confederacy of the United States led to the Emancipation Proclamation, which was the official end of legal slavery in the United States.

Emancipated African Americans in the United States still had to struggle against institutional racism, forced segregation, violation of voting rights, and even terrorism. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) - perhaps the most notorious racist organization - formed shortly after emancipation. The KKK espouses racist ideologies and enforces discriminatory cultural norms with murderous violence or the threat thereof.

Fascism

The fascist regimes, which rose to power in Europe and Japan before World War II, advocated and implemented racist, xenophobic, and often genocidal policies and attitudes. While racism, xenophobia, and genocide were not new, the scope of the atrocities committed by the German Nazis and the Japanese Imperialists was without precedent.

Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism is a specific case of racism targeting the Jewish people, although scholars argue whether it should be considered a sui generis specie or not. For example, in the Russian Empire, official segregation of the Russian Jews in the Pale of Settlement since the early 1800s was compounded by the 1882 May Laws. Waves of anti-Semitic pogroms (riots against a particular group), in many cases state-sponsored, proliferated from 1881-1884, 1902-1906, and 1914-1921. The term is deceptive because "Semitic" peoples technically include the Arabs and the Hebrews, but "anti-Semitism" only refers to the latter.

Scholars distinguish traditional, Christian anti-Semitism, which derives from the Biblical account of the deicide, with racial anti-Semitism, which ultimately led to the Holocaust. The State of Israel was established in 1948 when many Jews and Gentiles considered the creation of a Jewish nation-state (which was the aim of Zionism) the only way of acquiring real protection from possible future genocides. At the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the Roman Catholic Church cleared the Jews from allegations of deicide.

Types of Racism

Racism may be expressed individually - through explicit and implicit thoughts, feelings, or acts - or socially, through institutions that promote inequalities among "races", as in institutional racism.

Scientific racism

Nott and Gliddon's Indigenous races of the earth (1857) used misleading imagery to suggest that "Negroes" ranked between "whites" and chimpanzees. Note the different angles at which the "white" and "Negro" skulls are positioned. Nott and Gliddon's work is considered one of the classics of scientific racism.

Scientific racism refers to the use of science (or the veneer of science) to justify and support racist beliefs. The concept goes back at least to the early 18th century, though it gained most of its influence in the mid-19th century. Works like Arthur Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-1855) attempted to frame racism within the terms of biological difference among human beings. After the work of Charles Darwin became well-known, the rise of theories of evolution led many to consider some races more "evolved" than others. These points of view became very common within the scientific community at the time—even Darwin, who was an active abolitionist and considered all humans to be of the same species (against a trend of polygenism popular in anthropology at the time), believed that there were inherent biological differences in the mental capacities of different races. Ideologies such as social Darwinism and eugenics used and reinforced many of these views.

Some scientists argued against biological reenforcement of racism, even if they believed that biological races existed. In the fields of anthropology and biology, however, these were minority positions until the mid-20th century. During the rise of Nazism in Germany, many scientists in Western nations worked to debunk the racial theory on which the regime rested its claims of superiority. This, combined with repulsion to Nazi eugenics and the racial motivations behind the Holocaust, lead to a reorientation of opinion around scientific research on race in the years following World War II. Changes within scientific disciplines—such as the rise of Boasian school of anthropology in the United States—also contributed to this shift. Many of the scientific studies which claimed to support racist claims have since been methodologically debunked by scientists with specifically anti-racist agendas, such as Stephen J. Gould.

The status of the concept of biological race remains very controversial within science, though practically no mainstream scientists admit to using scientific data to justify racist beliefs. Some scientists, such as Arthur Jensen and Richard Lynn, have argued that the threat of being labeled as a "scientific racist" has made the scientific study of race and racial differences politically taboo and has stifled true scientific discourse. Many scientists, though, believe that there is no evidence for typological notions of biological race nor scientific justifications for racist beliefs.

Individual, structural, and ideological racism

Racism may be divided in three major subcategories: individual racism, structural racism, and ideological racism. Examples of individual racism include an employer not hiring a person, failing to promote or giving harsher duties or imposing harsher working conditions, or firing, someone, in whole or in part due to his race.

Researchers at the University of Chicago (Marianne Bertrand) and Harvard University (Sendhil Mullainathan) found in a 2003 study that there was widespread discrimination in the workplace against job applicants whose names were merely perceived as "sounding black." These applicants were 50% less likely than candidates perceived as having "white-sounding names" to receive callbacks for interviews, no matter their level of previous experience. Results were stronger for higher quality résumés. The researchers view these results as strong evidence of unconscious biases rooted in the country's long history of discrimination. This is an example of structural racism, because it shows a widespread established belief system. Another example is apartheid in South Africa, and the system of Jim Crow laws in the United States of America. Another source is lending inequities of banks, and so-called redlining.

Racial discrimination as an official government policy

Racial discrimination is and has been official government policy in several countries. The racial policy of Nazi Germany is the most famous example, along with Apartheid in South Africa. In the 1970s, Uganda expelled tens of thousands of ethnic Indians ^{[citation needed]}. Until 2003, Malaysia enforced discriminatory policies limiting access to university education for ethnic Chinese and Indian students who are citizens by birth of Malaysia, and many other policies explicitly favoring bumiputras (Malays) remain in force ^{[citation needed]}.

In the United States, Native Americans were considered an inferior race, to be "civilized" or else relegated to "reservations." In the twentieth century, racial profiling of minorities by law enforcement officials is a controversial subject. Law enforcement looks for people who "fit the profile" to commit a crime according to experience and statistics. Some people consider this to be a form of racism. Some claim that profiling young Arab male fliers at airports will only lead to increased recruitment of older, non-Arab, and female terrorists, as well as Arab males who might be mistaken for white males. Some also state that this is unnecessary, as it brings the mistrust of many people. Many critics of racial profiling claim that it is an unconstitutional practice because it amounts to questioning individuals on the basis of what crimes they might commit or could possibly commit, instead of what crimes they have actually committed. Thus, it shifts the emphasis from the act itself (the crime) to the person (the "criminal"); Michel Foucault argued in Discipline and Punish (1975) that this was a general tendency of "disciplinary societies", creating the psychological category of "delinquent".

Racial policy of Nazi Germany

The Racial Policy of Nazi Germany refers to the policies and laws implemented by Nazi Germany, asserting the superiority of the "Aryan race", and including measures aimed primarily against Jews.

The origins of the policy lay with the Dolchstoßlegende ("betrayal legend"), whereby disgruntled German nationalists blamed non-Germans for the loss of World War I. The Nazis exploited these sentiments and later developed them into the "Nuremberg laws". The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 employed a pseudo-scientific basis for racial discrimination against Jews. People with four German grandparents were of "German blood," while people were classified as Jews if they descended from three or more Jewish grandparents. Having one or more Jewish grandparents made someone "mixed blood." In the absence of discernible external differences, the Nazis used the religious observance of a person's grandparents to determine their "race."

A Gymnastics lesson from 1936 in a Berlin Jewish school

Though the laws were primarily directed against Jews, other "non-Aryan" people were subject to the laws and to other legislation concerned with "racial hygiene." Nazi scientist Eugen Fischer expressed particular concern toward the "Rhineland Bastards" - mixed-race offspring of black soldiers who had been stationed in the Rhineland as part of the French army of occupation. He believed in sterilizing these people in order to protect the racial purity of the German population. At least 400 mixed-race children were forcibly sterilized in the Rhineland by 1938, while 400 others were sent to concentration camps. Mixed marriages remained illegal throughout the Nazi's reign.

Apartheid in South Africa

"Petty apartheid": sign on Durban beach in English, Afrikaans and Zulu

Apartheid (literally "apartness" in Afrikaans and Dutch) was a system of racial segregation enforced in South Africa from 1948 to 1991. Under apartheid, people were legally classified into a racial group -the main ones being White, Black, Indian, and Coloured - and were geographically and forcibly separated from each other on the basis of the legal classification. The Black majority, in particular, legally became citizens of particular "homelands" that were nominally sovereign nations but operated more akin to United States "Indian Reservations" and Canadian "Aboriginal Reserves." In reality, a majority of Black South Africans had never resided in these "homelands."

In practice, this prevented non-white people — even if actually resident in white South Africa — from having a vote or influence, restricting their rights to faraway homelands which they may never have visited. Education, medical care, and other public services were sometimes identified as separate but equal, but those available to non-white people were in fact vastly inferior.

By law, the four racial groups were capitilized. The Coloured group included people of mixed Bantu, Khoisan, and European descent (with some Malay ancestry, especially in the Western Cape) together with some racially "pure" Khoisans. The Apartheid bureaucracy devised complex (and often arbitrary) criteria upon the implementation of the Population Registration Act to determine who belonged to the Coloured group. Minor officials would administer tests to determine if someone should be categorized Coloured or Black, or Coloured or White. Different members of the same family found themselves in different racial groups. Further tests determined membership of the various sub-racial groups of the Coloureds. Many Coloureds do not like the term "Coloured," but many South Africans continue to use it in the post-apartheid era. The expressions 'so-called coloured' (Afrikaans sogenaamde Kleurlinge) and 'brown people' (bruin mense) have acquired a wide usage in recent years.

Apartheid was implemented by the law. The following restrictions were not only adopted socially but were strictly enforced by law (the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act specifically allowed government to provide different levels of amenities for the different races):

• Non-white people were not allowed to run businesses or professional practices in areas designated as 'white South Africa' without a permit. Instead, they had to move to the black homelands and set up businesses and practices there.
• Transport and civil facilities were segregated.
• Black people were excluded from living or working in white areas unless they had a pass. Only black people with "Section 10" rights (those who had migrated to the cities before World War II) were exempt from this provision. White people required passes in "black" areas.
  • A pass was only issued to a black person with approved work. Spouses and children had to stay behind in non-white areas. Many white households employed black people as domestic workers, who were allowed to live on the premises— often in small rooms external to the family home.
  • A pass was issued for one magisterial district confining the holder to that area only.
  • Being without a valid pass made a person subject to immediate arrest and summary trial, often followed by deportation to the person's "homeland." Police vans roamed the "white" areas to round up "illegal" black people.

Black areas rarely had plumbing or electricity. Hospitals and ambulances were segregated: the white hospitals were generally of high quality with well-educated staff and ample funds while black hospitals were understaffed and underfunded.

In the 1970s each black child's education cost the state only one-tenth of each white child's. Higher education was provided in separate universities and colleges after 1959.

The government prohibited sex and marriage between the races.

Cinemas in white areas were not allowed to admit blacks. Most restaurants and hotels in white areas were not allowed to admit blacks, unless the government had given prior permission. Ambulances, bridges, drive-in cinema parking spaces, graveyards, maternity wards, parks, pedestrian crossings, public toilets, taxis and theatres were also segregated. Trains and buses were segregated. Black buses, known as "green" buses because they had a green marker on the front windscreen, stopped at black bus stops and white buses at white ones. Public beaches were racially segregated, with the best ones reserved for whites^[4]. Public swimming pools and libraries were also segregated. There were few black pools or libraries.

Black Africans were prohibited from attending "white" churches under the Churches Native Laws Amendment Act (1957). This was never rigidly enforced, and churches were one of the few places races could mix without the interference of the law.

Although trade unions for "Black" and "Coloured" workers had existed since the early 20th century, it was not until the 1980s reforms that trade unions for black workers were recognized by the government. The minimum yearly taxable income for "Black" and "Coloured" people was 360 Rand (30 Rand a month), while the "White" threshold was much higher, at 750 Rand (62.5 Rand per month).

Apartheid pervaded South African culture and law. The media reinforced the perception of non-white South Africans as second-class citizens, and the lack of opportunities for the races to mix in a social setting entrenched social distance between people.

Many of the inequalities created and maintained by apartheid still remain in South Africa. The country has one of the most unequal income distribution patterns in the world: approximately 60% of the population earns less than R42,000 per annum (about US$7,000), whereas 2.2% of the population has an income exceeding R360,000 per annum (about US$50,000) [5]. Poverty in South Africa is still largely defined by skin colour, with black people making up around 90% of the country's poor [6]. Subsequently, the government has implemented a policy of Black Economic Empowerment. Eighty percent of farming land still remains in the hands of white farmers [7]; the requirement that claimants for restoration of land seized during the apartheid era make a contribution towards the cost of the land "excludes the poorest layers of the population altogether" [8], while a large number of white farmers have been murdered [9] since 1994 in what campaign groups [10] claim is a campaign of genocide.

Native Americans in the United States

Native Americans in the United States (also known as Indians, American Indians, Amerindians, Amerinds, or Indigenous, Aboriginal or Original peoples or Americans) are the indigenous peoples and their descendants within the territory that is now encompassed by the continental United States and parts of Alaska.

From the 15th to 19th centruy, the European colonization of the Americas decimated the population of the Native Americans through displacement, disease, warfare, and enslavement.

In the 19th century, the incessant Westward expansion of the United States incrementally compelled large numbers of Native Americans to resettle further west - sometimes by force and almost always reluctantly. Under President Andrew Jackson, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which authorized the President to conduct treaties to exchange Native American land east of the Mississippi River for lands west of the river. As many as 100,000 Native Americans eventually relocated to the West as a result of this Indian Removal policy. In theory, relocation was supposed to be voluntary (and many Native Americans did remain in the East), but in practice great pressure was put on Native American leaders to sign removal treaties. Arguably the most egregious violation of the stated intention of the removal policy was the Treaty of New Echota, which was signed by a dissident faction of Cherokees but not by the elected leadership. President Martin Van Buren's brutal enforcement of the treaty resulted in the deaths of an estimated 4,000 Cherokees (mostly from disease) on the Trail of Tears.

Conflicts, generally known as "Indian Wars," broke out between U.S. forces and many different tribes. U.S. government authorities entered numerous treaties during this period but later abrogated many for various reasons. Well-known military engagements include the Native American victory at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876 and the massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee in 1890. On January 31, 1876, the United States government ordered all remaining Native Americans to move into reservations or reserves. This, together with the near-extinction of the American Bison that many tribes had lived on, set about the downturn of Prairie Culture that had developed around the use of the horse for hunting, travel, and trading.

Students at the Bismarck Indian School in the early 20th century

American policy toward Native Americans has been an evolving process. In the late nineteenth century, reformers, in efforts to "civilize" Indians, adapted the practice of educating native children in Indian Boarding Schools. These schools, which were primarily run by Christians, proved traumatic to Native American children, who were forbidden to speak their native languages, taught Christianity instead of their native religions, and in other ways forced to abandon their various Native American identities and adopt European-American culture. There are also many documented cases of sexual, physical, and mental abuses occurring at these schools.

The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 gave United States citizenship to Native Americans, in part because of an interest by many to see them merged with the American mainstream, and also because of the heroic service of many Native American veterans in World War I.

Related concepts

• Affirmative action is the practice of favoring or benefiting members of a racial minority in areas such as college admissions and workplace advancement, in an attempt to counter-balance what are perceived as systemic biases towards the racial majority. Though presented as an effort to ensure equal opportunity, opponents consider it racially discriminatory.
• Reverse racism is a pejorative and controversial term used to describe attitudes, behaviors, and policies which are racially discriminatory in a manner contrary (i.e. reverse) to historical patterns of racial discrimination. Opponents of racial quotas (Affirmative Action in the U.S.) in jobs and schools contend that explicitly factoring race into the application or approval process is a form of institutionalized reverse racism which unfairly discriminates against racial categories with historically higher admission or approval rates. Proponents contend that racial quotas promote integration and economic equality of groups which have been affected by racism.
• Historical, economic, or social disparity is a form of discrimination caused by past racism. Deficits in the formal education and other kinds of preparation in the parents' generation and racist attitudes and actions of members of the general population affect the present generation of a certain race. (e.g. A member of Race Y, Mary, has her opportunities adversely affected (directly and/or indirectly) by the mistreatment of her ancestors of race Y.)
• Institutional racism or structural racial discrimination is racial discrimination by governments, corporations, or other large organizations with the power to influence the lives of many individuals. See Affirmative Action.
• Cultural racial discrimination occurs when members of one culture build the assumption of inferiority of one or more races into their culturally-maintained image of those races. (e.g. Members of group X are taught to believe that they are members of a superior race, and, consequently, they consider members of other races inferior.)
• Same-race racism occurs when members of one race associate behaviors or appearances of other members of their race as being related to negative features of another race. Some darker-skinned African Americans dislike lighter-skinned African Americans because of their lighter shade of skin, which may or may not be associated with white parentage at some point in their genealogy. A form of cultural racism (see above) can also be related to this, where members of a racial group are chastized by members of their own group for co-opting a culture which is perceived to be associated with another race. (e.g. A stigma against "acting white" exists in some African-American communities.)
• Racial discrimination is different treatment of people on the basis of characteristics which may be classified as racial - including skin color, cultural heritage, and religion. (e.g. Mary refuses to hire John because he is of race Y.) This is a concept not unanimously agreed upon. While this usually refers to discrimination against minority racial groups in Western societies, it can also refer to the opposite situation. This form of discrimination is often called reverse discrimination when it is due to affirmative action or other attempts to remedy past or current discrimination against minority racial groups.
• Racialism is a term often found within white separatist literature, inferring an social emphasis on racial origin. Racism implies an assumption of racial superiority and harmful intent, whereas separatists sometimes prefer the term "racialism," indicating a strong interest in matters of race without necessarily assuming superiority or a desire to harm others. Rather, they focus on racial segregation and white pride. That said, most English dictionaries and most people make no sharp distinction between "racism" and "racialism."
• Racial prejudice is pre-formed personal opinions about individuals on the basis of race. (e.g. John thinks that Mary will have bad attribute X solely because Mary is a member of race Y.)
• Global apartheid is a phrase used by those who argue that the international economic, social, and political system is racist and is designed so that a white minority accrues more wealth and power and enjoys more human and legal rights internationally than the non-white world majority.

Bibliography

• Elazar Barkan, The retreat of scientific racism: changing concepts of race in Britain and the United States between the world wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
• Bruce Dain, A hideous monster of the mind: American race theory in the early republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). (18th century US racial theory)
• Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1952. Race and History (UNESCO)
• Vincent F. Rocchio, Reel Racism. Confronting Hollywood's Construction of Afro-American Culture, Westview Press 2000
• Stokes, DaShanne. (In Press) Legalized Segregation and the Denial of Religious Freedom
• Ann Laura Stoler, "Racial histories and their regimes of truth," Political Power and Social Theory, 11 (1997): 183-206. (historiography of race and racism)
• Pierre-André Taguieff, 1987. La Force du préjugé. Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles, etc. (one among many others books on the subject) (Tel Gallimard, La Découverte) ISBN 2070719774 (French)

• Bauer, Yehuda A History Of The Holocaust, New York: F. Watts, 1982 ISBN 0531098621.
• Friedländer, Saul Nazi Germany and the Jews Volume 1 The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939, New York: HarperCollins, 1997 ISBN 0060190426
• Peukert, Detlev Inside Nazi Germany: conformity, opposition and racism in everyday life London : Batsford, 1987 ISBN 071345217X.

External links

• From Nova Online: George W. Gill argues here for the biological concept of "race" and, in a matching article, C. Loring Brace argues against the existence of "race" as a biological entity.
• From California Newsreel: Race: The Power of an Illusion, an in-depth website (companion to a California Newsreel film), presenting the argument that while race is a biological fiction, racism permeates the structure of society.

• And from American Renaissance, a "pro-white" publication, Race Denial: The Power of a Delusion, a detailed critique seeking to refute the film.

• Racism from Global Issues
• Institute for Race Relations
• The Mis-portrayal of Darwin as a Racist - Refutes claims that Darwin was a racist or that his views inspired the Nazis

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