Racism comes from the notion of race : an idea based on looks, appearance, common culture, and perceived commonality. Today it is replaced by a new word, called ethnicity. But in the 19th century racism was a well respected and widely pursued academic discipline. Maybe you folks have a former academic discipline called :
Scientific racism
Scientific racism is the use of scientific techniques and hypotheses to sanction the belief in racial superiority, inferiority or racism. [1]
This is not the same as using scientific findings and the scientific method to investigate differences among races. In biological classification differences between animal groups are investigated without necessarily claiming that one group is superior to others. Racism or racial supremacy is the additional claim that some races are superior to other races.
However, scientific racism is often used more narrowly as a synonym for the contemporary and historical theories that employ anthropology (notably physical anthropology), anthropometry, craniometry, and other disciplines, in fabricating anthropologic typologies supporting the classification of human populations into physically discrete human races that are claimed to be superior or inferior, specifically in a historical context of ca. 1880 to 1930. Scientific racism was thus most common during the New Imperialism period (ca. 1880s–1914), in the second half of the 19th century, and used in justifying white European imperialism.
After the end of the Second World War (1939–45) and the occurrence of the Holocaust, scientific racism in theory and action was formally denounced, especially in UNESCO's antiracist statement "The Race Question" (1950): "The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth of 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years, it has taken a heavy toll in human lives, and caused untold suffering." However, the statement acknowledged that different human races exist.[2] Beginning in the later 20th century, scientific racism has been criticized as obsolete, and as historically used to support or validate racist world-views, based upon belief in the existence and significance of racial categories and a hierarchy of superior and inferior races.[3]
The term "scientific racism" is pejorative as applied to contemporary theories, such as in The Bell Curve (1994), which investigated racial differences in IQ, concluding that genetics explained at least part of the IQ differences between races. Critics argue that such works are motivated by racist presumptions unsupported by available evidence. Publications such as the Mankind Quarterly, founded as an explicitly "race-conscious" publication, have been accused of scientific racism for publishing articles on controversial interpretations of human evolution, intelligence, ethnography, language, mythology, archaeology, and race subjects.[4] The pejorative label, "scientific racism", criticizes studies claiming to establish a connection between, for example, race and intelligence, and argues that this promotes the idea of "superior" and "inferior" human races.[5] Recent authors consider their work to be scientific and dispute use of the term "racism"; they may prefer terms such as "race realism" or "racialism".
Westerners, most specifically Americans have used the notion of race to create dubious and bigoted laws like Jim Crow laws, to enforce compulsory segregation.
Jim Crow Laws
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in Southern states of the former Confederacy, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans. The separation led to treatment, financial support and accommodations that were usually inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. De jure segregation mainly applied to the Southern United States. Northern segregation was generally de facto, with patterns of segregation in housing enforced by covenants, bank lending practices, and job discrimination, including discriminatory union practices for decades.
Some examples of Jim Crow laws are the segregation of public schools, public places, and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains for whites and blacks. The U.S. military was also segregated. These Jim Crow Laws were separate from the 1800–1866 Black Codes, which had previously restricted the civil rights and civil liberties of African Americans. State-sponsored school segregation was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education. Generally, the remaining Jim Crow laws were overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964[1] and the Voting Rights Act of 1965............ ..............
In west, racism has been used to justify state sponsored and institutionalized exploitation and persecution.It has been following a few predictable steps:
(1) Anxiety and discomfort due to easily observable difference with the native inhabitants of a exotic landmass (e.g, India. pre-colombian America), inability to deal with the uniqueness.
(2) To alleviate the distress of difference, westerners( specifically west European seafaring naval powers, like Spain, Portugal and later England, France), began a state sanctioned programme of ridiculing , denigrating the local population , all the while appropriating the ideas and knowledge of the the local population.
(3) This is followed by a massive programme of killing or purging of local inhabitants , either by pogrom (such as ethnic cleansing and liquidation of native Americans by the early settlers of USA )or by deliberate spreading of diseases or indifference to natural black swan events like famine (British in India), or both (Spanish conquistadors and Christopher Columbus in Latin America).
(4) Finally , once the land is cleansed of any people with whom they might share some difference, after long time, they start offering apologies,and making white-guilt movies, such as Avatar, Pocahontas, Dancing with the wolves, etc. But they really do not matter , because by this time the once competing civilization has been relegated to the pages of history books, or allowed to exist as predominantly museum , theme park culture( today's native Americans).
Has anybody seen traces of any of these traits in today's India, North or South? I know I have not. Do we really have racism , or is it just xenophobia?
