July 7, 2011




 is the belief that there are inherent differences in people’s traits and capacities that are entirely due to their race, however defined, and that, as a consequence, justify the different treatment of those people, both socially and legally. Moreover, racism is the practice of the different treatment of certain a group or groups, which is then justified by recourse to racial stereotyping or pseudo-science.

Those who disagree with the proposition that there are races or that there are such inherent (i.e., non-personal, social, or cultural) differences regard any differences in treatment of people on the basis of those criteria as being racial discrimination. Some of those who argue that there are such inherent differences also argue that one race is inferior to another race.[1][2][3] In the case of institutional racism, certain racial groups may be denied rights or benefits, or receive preferential treatment.

Racial discrimination typically points out taxonomic differences between different groups of people, although anyone may be discriminated against on an ethnic or cultural basis, independent of their somatic differences. According to the United Nations conventions, there is no distinction between the term racial discrimination and ethnicity discrimination.

There is some evidence that the meaning of the term has changed over time, and that earlier definitions of racism involved the simple belief that human populations are divided into separate races.[4] Many biologists, anthropologists, and sociologists reject this taxonomy in favor of more specific and/or empirically verifiable criteria, such as geography, ethnicity, or a history of endogamy.[5]

The word racism as a distinct term did not appear in the English language until the 1930s.[6] While the term “race hatred” had been used by sociologist Frederick Hertz in the late 1920s, “racism” was coined as the title of the early 1930s book by sexologist and homosexual activist Magnus Hirschfeld.[6]


Racism involves the belief in racial differences, which acts as a justification for non-equal treatment (which some regard as “discrimination”) of members of that race.[1] The term is commonly used negatively and is usually associated with race-based prejudiceviolencedislikediscrimination, or oppression, the term can also have varying and contested definitions. Racialism is a related term, sometimes intended to avoid these negative meanings. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, racism is a belief or ideology that all members of each racial group possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, in particular to distinguish it as being either superior or inferior to another racial group or racial groups. [7]

The Oxford English Dictionary defines racism as the “belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races” and the expression of such prejudice,[8] while the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines it as a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority or inferiority of a particular racial group, and alternatively that it is also the prejudice based on such a belief.[9] The Macquarie Dictionary defines racism as: “the belief that human races have distinctive characteristics which determine their respective cultures, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule or dominate others.”


The UN does not define “racism”, however it does define “racial discrimination”: According to the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination,


This definition does not make any difference between discrimination based on ethnicity and race, in part because the distinction between the two remains debatable among anthropologists.[11]Similarly, in British law the phrase racial group means “any group of people who are defined by reference to their race, colour, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origin”.[12]


Some sociologists have defined racism as a system of group privilege. In Portraits of White Racism, David Wellman has defined racism as “culturally sanctioned beliefs, which, regardless of intentions involved, defend the advantages whites have because of the subordinated position of racial minorities”.[13] Sociologists Noël A. Cazenave and Darlene Alvarez Maddern define racism as “…a highly organized system of ‘race’-based group privilege that operates at every level of society and is held together by a sophisticated ideology of color/’race’ supremacy. Sellers and Shelton (2003) found that a relationship between racial discrimination and emotional distress was moderated by racial ideology and public regard beliefs. That is, racial centrality appears to promote the degree of discrimination African American young adults perceive whereas racial ideology may buffer the detrimental emotional effects of that discrimination. Racist systems include, but cannot be reduced to, racial bigotry,”.[14]Sociologist and former American Sociological Association president Joe Feagin argues that the United States can be characterized as a “total racist society”[15]

– :“Police harassment and brutality directed at black men, women, and children are as old as American society, dating back to the days of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. Such police actions across the nation today reveal important aspects of . . . the commonplace discriminatory practices of individual whites . . . [and] white dominated institutions that allow or encourage such practices..”[16]


Main article: Xenophobia

Dictionary definitions of xenophobia include: deep-rooted antipathy towards foreigners (Oxford English Dictionary; OED), unreasonable fear or hatred of the unfamiliar, especially people of other races (Webster’s)[17] The Dictionary of Psychology defines it as “a fear of strangers”.[18]


Main article: Supremacism

The Middle Ages Crusades have been described as an example of white supremacist colonialism.[19] Centuries of European colonialism of the Americas, Africa and Asia was excused by white supremacist attitudes.[20] During the 19th century, the phrase “The White Man’s Burden” was widely used to justify imperialist policy as a noble enterprise.[21][22]


Main article: Racial segregation

Racial segregation is the separation of humans into racial groups in daily life. It may apply to activities such as eating in a restaurant, drinking from a water fountain, using a bath room, attending school, going to the movies, or in the rental or purchase of a home.[23] Segregation is generally outlawed, but may exist through social norms, even when there is no strong individual preference for it, as suggested by Thomas Schelling‘s models of segregation and subsequent work.


Racial discrimination

Racial discrimination refers to the separation of people through a process of social division into categories not necessarily related to races for purposes of differential treatment. Racial segregationpolicies may officialize it, but it is also often exerted without being legalized. Researchers, including Dean Karlan and Marianne Bertrand, at the MIT and the University of Chicago 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. In contrast, institutions and courts have upheld discrimination against whites when it is done to promote a diverse work or educational environment, even when it was shown to be to the detriment of qualified applicants.[24][25] The researchers view these results as strong evidence of unconscious biases rooted in the United States‘ long history of discrimination (i.e. Jim Crow laws, etc.)[26]

Students protesting againstracial quotas in Brazil. The sign reads: “Want a vacancy? Pass the Vestibular!”


Further information: Institutional racismState racismAffirmative actionRacial profiling, and Racism by country

Institutional racism (also known as structural racism, state racism or systemic racism) is racial discrimination by governments, corporations, religions, or educational institutions or other large organizations with the power to influence the lives of many individuals. Stokely Carmichael is credited for coining the phrase institutional racism in the late 1960s. He defined the term as “the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin”.[27]

Maulana Karenga argued that racism constituted the destruction of culture, language, religion and human possibility, and that the effects of racism were “the morally monstrous destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples.”[28]


This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed(November 2010)

Historical economic or social disparity is alleged to be a form of discrimination caused by past racism and historical reasons, affecting the present generation through deficits in the formal education and kinds of preparation in previous generation, and through primarily unconscious racist attitudes and actions on members of the general population.


Although a capitalist economy would avoid discrimination in order to avoid extra cost, this can be avoided in other ways. A capitalist company, for example, may use racist hiring policies as it deviates towards the “cultural norm”. For example, in a predominantly white society, hiring a person of colour into a position of management may then cause disputes, and damage communications between other employers. Thus, the company would be economically put in a deficit because of the discrimination of other companies, as they invoke discrimination and isolate that company. Although this may be a radical, over exaggerated point of view, it portrays how pervasive racism is and how company[who?] will some time deviate towards racist hiring policies in order to henceforth be not isolated, thus preventing the company from going into an economic deficit. (Burton 2009:1)

For decades, African American farmers said they were unjustly being denied farm loans or subjected to longer waits for loan approval because of racism,[29] and accused the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) of not responding to their complaints.[30]

During the Spanish colonial period, 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.[31]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. Almost uniformly, people who are darker-skinned and of indigenous descent make up the peasantry and working classes, while lighter-skinned, Spanish-descent Latin Americans are in the ruling elite.[32][33]


Declarations and international law against racial discrimination

In 1919, a proposal to include a racial equality provision in the Covenant of the League of Nations was supported by a majority, but not adopted in the Paris Peace Conference, 1919. In 1943, Japan and its allies declared work for the abolition of racial discrimination to be their aim at the Greater East Asia Conference.[34] Article 1 of the 1945 UN Charter includes “promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race” as UN purpose.

In 1950, UNESCO suggested in The Race Question —a statement signed by 21 scholars such as Ashley MontaguClaude Lévi-StraussGunnar MyrdalJulian Huxley, etc. — to “drop the term race altogether and instead speak of ethnic groups“. The statement condemned scientific racism theories that had played a role in the Holocaust. It aimed both at debunking scientific racist theories, by popularizing modern knowledge concerning “the race question,” and morally condemned racism as contrary to the philosophy of the Enlightenment and its assumption of equal rights for all. Along with Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), The Race Question influenced the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court desegregation decision in “Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka“.[35] Also in 1950, the European Convention on Human Rights was adopted, widely used on racial discrimination issues.[36]

The United Nations use the definition of racial discrimination laid out in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted in 1966:




A racist political campaign poster from the 1866 Pennsylvania gubernatorial election

A sign on a racially segregated beach inSouth Africa during the South Africa under apartheid

As an ideology, racism existed during the 19th century as “scientific racism“, which attempted to provide a racial classification of humanity.[39] Although such racist ideologies have been widely discredited after World War II and the Holocaust, racism and racial discrimination have remained widespread around the world. Some examples of this in present day are statistics including, but not limited to, the racial breakdown of the prison population versus the national population, physical abilities and mental ability statistics, and other data gathered by scientific groups. While these statistics may be accurate, and can show trends, it’s inappropriate in most countries to assume that because a particular race has a high crime or low literacy rate, that the entire race of people are inherent criminals, or inherently unintelligent.

It was already noted by DuBois that, in making the difference between races, it is not race that we think about, but culture: “…a common history, common laws and religion, similar habits of thought and a conscious striving together for certain ideals of life”.[40] Late 19th century nationalists were the first to embrace contemporary discourses on “race”, ethnicity and “survival of the fittest” to shape new nationalist doctrines. Ultimately, race came to represent not only the most important traits of the human body, but was also regarded as decisively shaping the character and personality of the nation.[41]


Bolstered by some nationalist and ethnocentric values and achievements of choice, this concept of racial superiority evolved to distinguish from other cultures, that were considered inferior or impure. This emphasis on culture corresponds to the modern mainstream definition of racism: “Racism does not originate from the existence of ‘races’. It creates them through a process of social division into categories: anybody can be racialised, independently of their somatic, cultural, religious differences.”[42]

This definition explicitly ignores the biological concept of race, still subject to scientific debate. In the words of David C. Rowe “A racial concept, although sometimes in the guise of another name, will remain in use in biology and in other fields because scientists, as well as lay persons, are fascinated by human diversity, some of which is captured by race.”[43]


Racism has been a motivating factor in social discriminationracial segregationhate speech and violence (such as pogromsgenocides and ethnic cleansings). Despite the persistence of racial stereotypes, humor and epithets in much everyday language, racial discrimination is illegal in many countries.

Ironically, anti-racism has also become a political instrument of abuse. Some politicians have practised race baiting in an attempt to win votes. In a reversal of values, anti-racism is being propagated by despots in the service of obscurantism and the suppression of women. Philosopher Pascal Bruckner claimed that“Anti-racism in the UN has become the ideology of totalitarian regimes who use it in their own interests.”[45]

Ethnic nationalism

Further information: Ethnic nationalism  and Romantic nationalism

After the Napoleonic Wars, Europe was confronted with the new “nationalities question,” leading to reconfigurations of the European map, on which the frontiers between the states had been delimited during the 1648 Peace of WestphaliaNationalism had made its first appearance with the invention of thelevée en masse by the French revolutionaries, thus inventing mass conscription in order to be able to defend the newly founded Republic against the Ancien Régime order represented by the European monarchies. This led to the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802) and then to the Napoleonic conquests, and to the subsequent European-wide debates on the concepts and realities of nations, and in particular of nation-states. The Westphalia Treaty had divided Europe into various empires and kingdoms (Ottoman EmpireHoly Roman EmpireSwedish EmpireKingdom of France, etc.), and for centuries wars were waged between princes (Kabinettskriege in German).

Modern nation-states appeared in the wake of the French Revolution, with the formation of patriotic sentiments for the first time in Spain during the Peninsula War (1808–1813 – known in Spain as the Independence War). Despite the restoration of the previous order with the 1815 Congress of Vienna, the “nationalities question” became the main problem of Europe during the Industrial Era, leading in particular to the 1848 Revolutions, the Italian unification completed during the 1871 Franco-Prussian War, which itself culminated in the proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors in thePalace of Versailles, thus achieving the German unification.

Armenian civilians are marched by armed Turkish soldiers. Ottoman Empire, April 1915.

Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire, the “sick man of Europe“, was confronted with endless nationalist movements, which, along with the dissolving of theAustrian-Hungarian Empire, would lead to the creation after World War I of the various nation-states of the Balkans, with “national minorities” in their borders.[46] Ethnic nationalism, which advocated the belief in a hereditary membership of the nation, made its appearance in the historical context surrounding the creation of the modern nation-states.

One of its main influences was the Romantic nationalist movement at the turn of the 19th century, represented by figures such as Johann Herder (1744–1803), Johan Fichte (1762–1814) in the Addresses to the German Nation (1808), Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), or also, in France, Jules Michelet (1798–1874). It was opposed to liberal nationalism, represented by authors such as Ernest Renan (1823–1892), who conceived of the nation as a community, which, instead of being based on the Volk ethnic group and on a specific, common language, was founded on the subjective will to live together (“the nation is a dailyplebiscite“, 1882) or also John Stuart Mill (1806–1873).[47]

Ethnic nationalism blended with scientific racist discourses, as well as with “continental imperialist” (Hannah Arendt, 1951[48]) discourses, for example in the pan-Germanism discourses, which postulated the racial superiority of the German Volk. The Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband), created in 1891, promoted German imperialism, “racial hygiene” and was opposed to intermarriage with Jews. Another popular current, the Völkisch movement, was also an important proponent of the German ethnic nationalist discourse, which combined with modern antisemitism. Members of the Völkisch movement, in particular the Thule Society, would participate in the founding of the German Workers’ Party (DAP) in Munich in 1918, the predecessor of the NSDAP Nazi party. Pan-Germanism and played a decisive role in the interwar period of the 1920s–1930s.[48]

These currents began to associate the idea of the nation with the biological concept of a “master race” (often the “Aryan race” or “Nordic race“) issued from the scientific racist discourse. They conflated nationalities with ethnic groups, called “races”, in a radical distinction from previous racial discourses that posited the existence of a “race struggle” inside the nation and the state itself. Furthermore, they believed that political boundaries should mirror these alleged racial and ethnic groups, thus justifying ethnic cleansing in order to achieve “racial purity” and also to achieve ethnic homogeneity in the nation-state.

Such racist discourses, combined with nationalism, were not, however, limited to pan-Germanism. In France, the transition from Republican, liberal nationalism, to ethnic nationalism, which made nationalism a characteristic of far-right movements in France, took place during the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the 19th century. During several years, a nation-wide crisis affected French society, concerning the alleged treason of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish military officer. The country polarized itself into two opposite camps, one represented by Émile Zola, who wrote J’accuse in defense of Alfred Dreyfus, and the other represented by the nationalist poet Maurice Barrès (1862–1923), one of the founders of the ethnic nationalist discourse in France.[49] At the same time, Charles Maurras(1868–1952), founder of the monarchist Action française movement, theorized the “anti-France,” composed of the “four confederate states of Protestants, Jews, Freemasons and foreigners” (his actual word for the latter being the pejorative métèques)). Indeed, to him the first three were all “internal foreigners,” who threatened the ethnic unity of the French people.

Ethnic conflicts

Further information: Ethnicity


Notions of race and racism often have played central roles in such ethnic conflicts. Throughout history, when an adversary is identified as “other” based on notions of race or ethnicity (in particular when “other” is construed to mean “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. According to historian Daniel Richter, Pontiac’s Rebellion saw the emergence on both sides of the conflict of “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.” (Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, p. 208) Basil Davidson insists in his documentary, Africa: Different but Equal, that racism, in fact, only just recently surfaced—as late as the 19th century, due to the need for a justification for slavery in the Americas.

The idea of slavery as an “equal-opportunity employer” was denounced with the introduction of Christian theory in the West. Maintaining that Africans were “subhuman” was the only loophole in the then accepted law that “men are created equal” that would allow for the sustenance of the Triangular Trade. New peoples in the Americas, possible slaves, were encountered, fought, and ultimately subdued, but, then, due to European diseases, their populations drastically decreased. Through both influences, theories about “race” developed, and these helped 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).

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda argued that, during the Valladolid controversy in the middle of the 16th century, the Native Americans were natural slaves because they had no souls. In Asia, the Chinese andJapanese 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 preferenced too.

Academic variants

Drawings from Josiah C. Nottand George Gliddon‘s Indigenous races of the earth (1857), which suggested black people ranked between white people andchimpanzees in terms of intelligence.

Owen ‘Alik Shahadah comments on this racism by stating: “Historically Africans are made to sway like leaves on the wind, impervious and indifferent to any form of civilization, a people absent from scientific discovery, philosophy or the higher arts. We are left to believe that almost nothing can come out of Africa, other than raw material.”[50]

Scottish philosopher and economist David Hume said, “I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There scarcely ever was a civilised nation of that complexion, nor even any individual, eminent either in action or in speculation. No ingenious manufacture among them, no arts, no sciences.”[51]German philosopher Immanuel Kant stated: “The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The Negroes are far below them, and at the lowest point are a part of the American people.”[52]

In the 19th century, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel declared that “Africa is no historical part of the world.” Hegel further claimed that blacks had no “sense of personality; their spirit sleeps, remains sunk in itself, makes no advance, and thus parallels the compact, undifferentiated mass of the African continent” (On Blackness Without Blacks: Essays on the Image of the Black in Germany, Boston: C.W. Hall, 1982, p. 94).

Fewer than 30 years before Nazi Germany instigated World War II, the German Otto Weininger, claimed: “A genius has perhaps scarcely ever appeared amongst the negroes, and the standard of their morality is almost universally so low that it is beginning to be acknowledged in America that their emancipation was an act of imprudence” (Sex and Character, New York: G.P. Putnam, 1906, p. 302).

The German conservative Oswald Spengler remarked on what he perceived as the culturally degrading influence of Africans in modern Western culture: in The Hour of Decision Spengler denounced “the ‘happy ending’ of an empty existence, the boredom of which has brought to jazz music and Negro dancing to perform the Death March for a great Culture” (The Hour of Decision, pp. 227–228). During the Nazi era, German scientists rearranged academia to support claims of a grand “Aryan” agent behind the splendors of all human civilizations, including India and Ancient Egypt.[52]

People Show (Völkerschau) inStuttgart (Germany) in 1928.

Scientific variants

Main article: Scientific racism
Further information: Unilineal evolution

The modern biological definition of race developed in the 19th century with scientific racist theories. The term scientific racism refers to the use of science to justify and support racist beliefs, which goes back to the early 18th century, though it gained most of its influence in the mid-19th century, during the New Imperialism period. Also known as academic racism, such theories first needed to overcome the Church‘s resistance to positivist accounts of history and its support of monogenism, the concept that all human beings were originated from the same ancestors, in accordance with creationist accounts of history.

These racist theories put forth on scientific hypothesis were combined with unilineal theories of social progress, which postulated the superiority of the European civilization over the rest of the world. Furthermore, they frequently made use of the idea of “survival of the fittest“, a term coined by Herbert Spencer in 1864, associated with ideas of competition, which were named social Darwinism in the 1940s. Charles Darwin himself opposed the idea of rigid racial differences in The Descent of Man (1871) in which he argued that humans were all of one species, sharing common descent. He recognised racial differences as varieties of humanity, and emphasised the close similarities between people of all races in mental faculties, tastes, dispositions and habits, while still contrasting the culture of the “lowest savages” with European civilization.[53][54]

At the end of the 19th century, proponents of scientific racism intertwined themselves with eugenics discourses of “degeneration of the race” and “blood heredity.” Henceforth, scientific racist discourses could be defined as the combination of polygenism, unilinealism, social Darwinism and eugenism. They found their scientific legitimacy on physical anthropology,anthropometrycraniometryphrenologyphysiognomy, and others now discredited disciplines in order to formulate racist prejudices.


The neo-Darwinian synthesis, first developed in the 1930s, eventually led to a gene-centered view of evolution in the 1960s. According to the Human Genome Project, the most complete mapping of human DNA to date indicates that there is no clear genetic basis to racial groups. While some genes are more common in certain populations, there are no genes that exist in all members of one population and no members of any other.[7]

Heredity and eugenics

Further information: Eugenics

The first theory of eugenics was developed in 1869 by Francis Galton (1822–1911), who used the then popular concept of degeneration. He applied statistics to study human differences and the alleged “inheritance of intelligence“, foreshadowing future uses of “intelligence testing” by the anthropometry school. Such theories were vividly described by the writer Émile Zola (1840–1902), who started publishing in 1871 a twenty-novel cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart, where he linked heredity to behavior. Thus, Zola described the high-born Rougons as those involved in politics (Son Excellence Eugène Rougon) and medicine (Le Docteur Pascal) and the low-born Macquarts as those fatally falling into alcoholism (L’Assommoir), prostitution (Nana), and homicide (La Bête humaine).

During the rise of Nazism in Germany, some scientists in Western nations worked to debunk the regime’s racial theories. A few argued against racist ideologies and discrimination, even if they believed in the alleged existence of biological races. However, in the fields of anthropology and biology, these were minority positions until the mid-20th century.[55] According to the 1950 UNESCO statement,The Race Question, an international project to debunk racist theories had been attempted in the mid-1930s. However, this project had been abandoned. Thus, in 1950, UNESCO declared that it had resumed:

up again, after a lapse of fifteen years, a project that the International Institute for Intellectual Co-operation has wished to carry through but that it had to abandon in deference to theappeasement policy of the pre-war period. The race question had become one of the pivots of Nazi ideology and policy. Masaryk and Beneš took the initiative of calling for a conference to re-establish in the minds and consciences of men everywhere the truth about race… Nazi propaganda was able to continue its baleful work unopposed by the authority of an international organisation.


Polygenism and racial typologies

Further information: Polygenism  and Typology (anthropology)

Works such as Arthur de Gobineau‘s An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–1855) may be considered as one of the first theorizations of this new racism, founded on an essentialist notion of race, which opposed the former racial discourse, of Boulainvilliers for example, which saw in races a fundamentally historical reality, which changed over time. Gobineau, thus, attempted to frame racism within the terms of biological differences among humans, giving it the legitimacy of biology. He was one of the first theorists to postulate polygenism, stating that there were, at the origins of the world, various discrete “races.”

Gobineau’s theories would be expanded, in France, by Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936)’s typology of races, who published in 1899 The Aryan and his Social Role, in which he claimed that the white, “Aryan race”, “dolichocephalic“, was opposed to the “brachycephalic” race, of whom the “Jew” was the archetype. Vacher de Lapouge thus created a hierarchical classification of races, in which he identified the “Homo europaeus (Teutonic, Protestant, etc.), the “Homo alpinus” (AuvergnatTurkish, etc.), and finally the “Homo mediterraneus” (NeapolitanAndalus, etc.) He assimilated races andsocial classes, considering that the French upper class was a representation of the Homo europaeus, while the lower class represented the Homo alpinus. Applying Galton’s eugenics to his theory of races, Vacher de Lapouge’s “selectionism” aimed first at achieving the annihilation of trade unionists, considered to be a “degenerate”; second, creating types of man each destined to one end, in order to prevent any contestation of labour conditions. His “anthroposociology” thus aimed at blocking social conflict by establishing a fixed, hierarchical social order[56]

The same year, William Z. Ripley used identical racial classification in The Races of Europe (1899), which would have a great influence in the United States. Other scientific authors include H.S. Chamberlain at the end of the 19th century (a British citizen who naturalized himself as German because of his admiration for the “Aryan race”) or Madison Grant, a eugenicist and author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916).

Human zoos

Human zoos (called “People Shows”), were an important means of bolstering popular racism by connecting it to scientific racism: they were both objects of public curiosity and of anthropology andanthropometry.[57][58] Joice Heth, an African American slave, was displayed by P.T. Barnum in 1836, a few years after the exhibition of Saartjie Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus”, in England. Such exhibitions became common in the New Imperialism period, and remained so until World War IICarl Hagenbeck, inventor of the modern zoos, exhibited animals beside humans who were considered “savages”.[59][60]

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 humans and orangutans: thus, racism was tied to Darwinism, creating a social Darwinist ideology that tried to ground itself in Darwin‘s scientific discoveries. The 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition displayed Kanaks from New Caledonia.[61] A “Congolese village” was on display as late as 1958 at the Brussels’ World Fair.

Evolutionary theories about the origins of racism

See also: Ethnocentrism


Their colleague Robert Kurzban designed an experiment whose results appeared to support this hypothesis. Using the Memory confusion protocol, they presented subjects with pictures of individuals and sentences, allegedly spoken by these individuals, which presented two sides of a debate. The errors that the subjects made in recalling who said what indicated that they sometimes misattributed a statement to a speaker of the same race as the “correct” speaker, although they also sometimes misattributed a statement to a speaker “on the same side” as the “correct” speaker. In a second run of the experiment, the team also distinguished the “sides” in the debate by clothing of similar colors; and in this case the effect of racial similarity in causing mistakes almost vanished, being replaced by the color of their clothing. In other words, the first group of subjects, with no clues from clothing, used race as a visual guide to guessing who was on which side of the debate; the second group of subjects used the clothing color as their main visual clue, and the effect of race became very small. [62]


In The Selfish Gene, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins writes that “Blood-feuds and inter-clan warfare are easily interpretable in terms of Hamilton‘s genetic theory.” Dawkins writes that racial prejudice, while not evolutionarily adaptive, “could be interpreted as an irrational generalization of a kin-selected tendency to identify with individuals physically resembling oneself, and to be nasty to individuals different in appearance”.[64] Simulation-based experiments in evolutionary game theory have attempted to provide an explanation for the selection of ethnocentric-strategy phenotypes.[65]

As state-sponsored activity

Main articles: Nazism and raceRacial policy of Nazi GermanyGeneralplan OstEugenics in Showa JapanApartheid in South AfricaRacial segregation in the United StatesKetuanan Melayu,Anti-Chinese legislation in Indonesia, and Anti-Japanese sentiment in Korea

U.S government poster from World War IIfeaturing a Japanese soldier depicted as a rat.

State racism – that is, institutions and practices of a nation-state that are grounded in racist ideology – has played a major role in all instances of settler colonialism, from the United States to Australia to Israel. It also played a prominent role in the Nazi Germany regime and fascist regimes in Europe, and in the first part of Japan’s Shōwa period. These governments advocated and implemented policies that were racist, xenophobic and, in case of Nazism, genocidal.[66][67][68] The politics of Zimbabwe promote discrimination against whites, in an effort of ethnically cleansing the country.[69]

State racism contributed as well to the formation of the Dominican Republic‘s identity [70] and violent actions encouraged by Dominican governmentalxenophobia against Haitians and “Haitian looking” people. Currently the Dominican Republic employs a de facto system of separatism for children and grandchildren of Haitians and black Dominicans, denying them birth certificates, education and access to health care.[71]

In history

Unbalanced scales.svg

In Antiquity

Edith Sanders cited the Babylonian Talmud, which divides mankind between the three sons of Noah, stating that “the descendants of Ham are cursed by being black, and [it] depicts Ham as a sinful man and his progeny as degenerates.”[72] 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 despotic government.[73] Though Aristotle does not specify any particular races, he argues that people from outside Greece are more prone to the burden of slavery than those from Ancient Greece.[74]

Middle Ages and Renaissance

Further information: Limpieza de sangre

In the Middle East and North Africa region, racist opinions were expressed within the works of some of its historians and geographers[75] including Al-MuqaddasiAl-JahizAl-MasudiAbu Rayhan BiruniNasir al-Din al-Tusi, and Ibn Qutaybah.[76] In the 14th century CE, the Tunisian Ibn Khaldun wrote:


Though the Qur’an expresses no racial prejudice, such prejudices later developed among Arabs for a variety of reasons:[73][78] their extensive conquests and slave trade; the influence of Aristotelianideas regarding slavery, which some Muslim philosophers directed towards Zanj (East African) and Turkic peoples;[73] and the influence of Judeo-Christian ideas regarding divisions among humankind.[79] In response to such views, the Afro-Arab author Al-Jahiz, himself of East African descent, wrote a book entitled Superiority Of The Blacks To The Whites,[80] and explained why the Zanj were black in terms of environmental determinism in the “On the Zanj” chapter of The Essays.[81] By the 14th century, a significant number of slaves came from sub-Saharan Africa, leading to the likes of Egyptian historian Al-Abshibi (1388–1446) writing: “It is said that when the [black] slave is sated, he fornicates, when he is hungry, he steals.”[82] According to J. Philippe Rushton, Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1,000 years could be summed up as follows:

Although the Qur’an stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the “Zanj” (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.[83]

13th century slave market in Yemen. Yemen officially abolished slavery in 1962. In the struggle for emancipation of slaves in the Islamic world, there was double-layered racism that favored the white slaves.[84]

It should be noted that ethnic prejudice among some elite Arabs was not limited to darker-skinned black people, but was also directed towards fairer-skinned “ruddy people” (including Persians, Turks, Caucasians and Europeans), while Arabs referred to themselves as “swarthy people”.[85] According to Arnold J. Toynbee: “The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue.”[86]

Richard E. Nisbett has said that the question of racial superiority may go back at least a thousand years, to the time when the Umayyad Caliphate invaded Hispania, occupying most of the Iberian Peninsula for six centuries, where they founded the advanced civilization of Al-Andalus (711–1492). Al-Andalus coincided with La Convivencia, an era of religious tolerance, and with the Golden age of Jewish culture in Iberia (912, the rule of Abd-ar-Rahman III – 1066,Granada massacre).[87] It was followed by a violent Reconquista under the Reyes Catolicos (Catholic Monarchs), Ferdinand V and Isabella I. The CatholicSpaniards then formulated the Cleanliness of blood doctrine. It was during this time in history that the Western concept of aristocratic “blue blood” emerged in a highly racialized and implicitly white supremacist context, as author Robert Lacey explains:


Following the expulsion of most Sephardic Jews from the Iberian peninsula, the remaining Jews and Muslims were forced to convert to Roman Catholicism, becoming “New Christians” which were despised and discriminated by the “Old Christians“. An Inquisition was carried out by members of the Dominican Order in order to weed out converts that still practiced Judaism and Islam in secret. The system and ideology of the limpieza de sangre ostracized Christian converts from society, regardless of their actual degree of sincerity in their faith.


At the end of the Renaissance, the Valladolid debate (1550–1551) concerning the treatment of natives of the “New World” opposed the Dominican friar and Bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé de Las Casasto another Dominican philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. The latter argued that “Indians” were natural slaves because they had no souls, and were therefore beneath humanity. 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 controversy concerning racism, slavery and Eurocentrism that would arise in the following centuries.

Although anti-Semitism has a long European history, related to Christianism (anti-Judaism), racism itself 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”, a historical and political discourse, which Foucault opposed to the philosophical and juridical discourse of sovereignty.[89] Foucault thus argued that the first appearance of racism as a social discourse (as opposed to simple xenophobia, which some might argue has existed in all places and times) may be found during the 1688 Glorious Revolution in Great Britain, in Edward Coke or John Lilburne‘s work.

However, this “discourse of race struggle”, as interpreted by Foucault, must be distinguished from the 19th century biological racism, also known as “race science” or “scientific racism“. Indeed, this early modern 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 distinct biological groups — but as a historical notion. Moreover, this discourse is opposed to the sovereign’s discourse: it is used by the bourgeoisie, the people and the aristocracy as a mean of struggle against the monarchy. This discourse, which first appeared in Great Britain, was then carried on in France by people such as BoulainvilliersNicolas Fréret, and then, during the 1789 French RevolutionSieyès, 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, the “people”.

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 descendants of foreign invaders, whom he called the “Franks“, while the Third Estate constituted according to him 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 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 became closely intertwined with nationalism, leading to the ethnic nationalist discourse that identified the “race” to the “folk“, leading to such movements as pan-Germanism,Zionismpan-Turkismpan-Arabism, and pan-Slavism, medieval racism precisely divided the nation into various non-biological “races”, which were thought as the consequences 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, even more, transformed this popular discourse into a “state racism” (e.g. Nazism). On the other hand, Marxists 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 position: 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 concepts of “blood heredity“, prevalent in the 19th century racist discourse.

19th century

Authors such as Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, have said that the racist ideology (popular racism) that developed at the end of the 19th century helped legitimize theimperialist conquests of foreign territories and the acts that accompanied them (such as the Herero and Namaqua Genocide of 1904–1907 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 also it is also thought to be a satirical appraisal of such imperialism. Racist ideology thus helped legitimize subjugation and the dismantling of the traditional societies of indigenous peoples, which were regarded as humanitarian obligations as a result of these racist beliefs.

However, during the 19th century, West European colonial powers were involved in the suppression of the Arab slave trade in Africa,[90] as well as in suppression of the slave trade in West Africa.[91]Other colonialists recognized the depravity of their actions but persisted for personal gain; some Europeans during the time period objected to the injustices caused by colonialism 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 owned by Leopold II of Belgium.

Examples of racial theories used include the creation of the Hamitic ethno-linguistic group during the European exploration of Africa. It was then restricted by Karl Friedrich Lepsius (1810–1877) to non-Semitic Afro-Asiatic languages.[92]

The term Hamite was applied to different populations within Africa, mainly comprising EthiopiansEritreansSomalisBerbers, and Nubians. 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.[93][94][95] Europeans considered Hamites to be more civilized thanBlack Africans, and more akin to themselves and Semitic peoples.[96] 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-EuropeansDravidiansSemites, and the Mediterranean race.

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).

One in a series of posters attacking Radical Republicanson the issue of black suffrage, issued during the Pennsylvania gubernatorial election of 1866.

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.[97] The colonization effort resulted from a mixture of motives with its founder Henry Clay stating; “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”.[98] 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.


“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.” [99]

20th century

Further information: HolocaustRacial segregation in the United States, and Rwandan Genocide

An improvised camp for Soviet POWs. Between June 1941 and January 1942, the Nazis killed an estimated 2.8 million Red Army POWs, whom they viewed as “subhuman”.[100]

Drinking fountain from mid-20th century with African-American drinking

The Nazis considered JewsGypsiesPoles and other Slavic people such as the RussiansUkrainiansCzechs and anyone else who was not an “Aryan” according to the contemporary Nazi race terminology to be subhuman (Untermensch). The Nazis rationalized that the Germans, being a super human (Übermenschlich) race, had a biological right to displace, eliminate and enslave inferiors.[101] Some 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis during theHolocaust. In the longer term,[102] the Nazis wanted to exterminate some 30–45 million Slavs.[103]

After the war, under the “Big Plan”, Generalplan Ost foresaw the eventual expulsion of more than 50 million non-Germanized Slavs of Eastern Europe throughforced migration, as well as some of the Balts, beyond the Ural Mountains and into Siberia. In their place, Germans would be settled in an extended “living space” (Lebensraum) of the 1000-Year Empire (Tausendjähriges Reich). Herbert Backe was one of the orchestrators of the Hunger Plan – the plan to starve tens of millions of Slavs in order to ensure steady food supplies for the German people and troops.[104]


“What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me… Whether the other peoples live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; apart from that it does not interest me. Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany… We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude to animals, will also adopt a decent attitude to these human animals, but it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them and to bring them ideals… I shall speak to you here with all frankness of a very serious subject. We shall now discuss it absolutely openly among ourselves, nevertheless we shall never speak of it in public. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race.”[105]

Serious race riots in Durban between Indians and Zulus erupted in 1949.[106] 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.[107] They migrated to escape racial discrimination and wholesale nationalisation of private enterprise a few years later in 1964.[108] The Zanzibar Revolution of January 12, 1964 put an end to the local Arab dynasty.[109] Thousands of Arabs and Indians in Zanzibar were massacred in riots, and thousands more were detained or fled the island.[110] On 4 August 1972, Idi Amin, President of Uganda, ethnically cleansed Uganda’s Asians giving them 90 days to leave the country.[111]


During the Congo Civil War (1998–2003), Pygmies were hunted down like game animals and eaten. Both sides of 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 Mbuti pygmies, has asked the UN Security Council to recognise cannibalism as a crime against humanity and an act of genocide.[112] A report released by the United NationsCommittee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination condemns Botswana‘s treatment of the ‘Bushmen‘ as racist.[113]

The mass demonstrations and riots against African students in NanjingChina, lasted from December 1988 to January 1989.[114] Bar owners in central Beijing had been forced “not to serve black people or Mongolians” during the 2008 Summer Olympics.[115] Some neighborhood committees in Guangzhou bar Africans from living in residential complexes.[116] 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 colour.[117] Her attention in the media opened serious debates about racism in China and racial prejudice.[118]

In Asia and Latin America, light skin is seen as more attractive.[119] Thus, skin whitening cosmetic products are popular in East Asia[120] and India.[121]

Some 70,000 black African Mauritanians were expelled from Mauritania in the late 1980s.[122] In the Sudan, black African captives in the civil war were often enslaved, and female prisoners were often used sexually.[123] The Darfur conflict has been described by some as a racial matter.[124] In October 2006, Niger announced that it would deport the Arabs living in the Diffa region of eastern Niger toChad.[125] This population numbered about 150,000.[126] While the Government collected Arabs in preparation for the deportation, two girls died, reportedly after fleeing Government forces, and three women suffered miscarriages.[127]

The Ethiopian Jewish community’s integration into Israeli society has been complicated by racist attitudes on the part of some elements of Israeli society and the official establishment.[128][129] The Israeli media reported that residents of Pisgat Ze’ev, a large Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, had formed a vigilante-style patrol to stop interracial dating between Arab men and local Jewish girls. In the 2007 poll, more than half of Israeli Jews said that intermarriage should be equated with “national treason”.[130]

The burnt out remains of Govinda’s Indian Restaurant in Fiji, May 2000

The Jakarta riots of May 1998 targeted many Chinese Indonesians.[131] The anti-Chinese legislation was in the Indonesian constitution until 1998. Xenophobia against Chinese migrants is currently on the rise in Africa[132][133][134] and Oceania.[135][136] Anti-Chinese rioting, involving tens of thousands of people,[137]broke out in Papua New Guinea in May 2009.[138] The Fiji coup of 2000 has provoked a violent backlash against the Indo-Fijians.[139] Fiji citizens of Indian, European, mixed race or other island heritage have become second-class citizens.[140][141] Racial divisions also exist in Guyana[142] and Malaysia.[143]

Inter-minority variants

Prejudiced thinking among and between minority groups does occur, for example conflicts between African Americans and Korean Americans (notably in theLos Angeles riots of 1992), by blacks towards Jews (such as the riots in Crown Heights in 1991), between new immigrant groups (such as Latinos), or towards whites.[144][145][146][147] One particularly pernicious form of racism in the United States is racial segregation, which, it can be argued, continues to exist today.[148]

There has been a long-running racial tension between African Americans and Mexican Americans.[149][150][151] There have been several significant riots inCalifornia prisons in which Mexican American inmates and African Americans have specifically targeted each other based on racial reasons.[152][153] There have been reports of racially motivated attacks against African Americans who have moved into neighborhoods occupied mostly by Mexican Americans, and vice versa.[154][155][156][157] In the late 1920s in California, there was animosity between the Filipinos and the Mexicans and between European Americans and Filipino Americans since they competed for the same jobs.[158] Recently, there has also been an increase in racial violence between African immigrants and Blacks who have already lived in the country for generations.[159]

The Aztlan movement has been described as racist. The movement’s goal is repossession of the American southwest. It has also been called the Mexican “reconquista” (re-conquest) whose name was inspired by the Spanish reconquista, which led to the expulsion of the Moors from Spain.[160] According to gang experts and law enforcement agents, a longstanding race war between the Mexican Mafia and the Black Guerilla family, a rival African American prison gang, has generated such intense racial hatred among Mexican Mafia leaders or shot callers, that they have issued a “green light” on all blacks. A sort of gang-life fatwa, this amounts to a standing authorization for Latino gang members to prove their mettle by terrorizing or even murdering any blacks sighted in a neighborhood claimed by a gang loyal to the Mexican Mafia.[161]

In Britain, tensions between minority groups can be just as strong as those between minorities and the majority population. In Birmingham, there have been long-term divisions between the Black and South Asian communities, which were illustrated in the Handsworth riots and in the smaller 2005 Birmingham riots. In Dewsbury, a Yorkshire town with a relatively high Muslim population, there have been tensions and minor civil disturbances between Kurds and South Asians.[162][163]

In France, home to Europe’s largest population of Muslims — about 6 million — as well as the continent’s largest community of Jews, about 600,000, anti-Jewish violence, property destruction, and racist language has been increasing over the last several years. Jewish leaders perceive the Muslim population as intensifying anti-Semitism in France, mainly among Muslims of Arab or Africanheritage, but also this anti-Semitism is perceived as also growing among Caribbean islanders from former colonies.[164][165]

International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

UNESCO marks March 21 as the yearly International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, in memory of the events that occurred on March 21, 1960 in SharpevilleSouth Africa, where police killed student demonstrators peacefully protesting against the apartheid regime.


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