It’s probably past time to get into this, but I think we need to step back from our attempts to identify racism and ponder, for a minute or two, what the term actually means.

Wikipedia, though it’s got its issues, is a pretty good place to start.  Its entry on “racism” begins thus:

Racism is commonly defined as a belief or doctrine where inherent biological differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, with a corollary that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule others.[1]

I think that the corollary is really important to keep in mind.  The belief in the biological differences that go beyond physical appearance and relative susceptibility to various diseases (I’m thinking of things like sickle-cell in the African-American population, for example) has been pretty much disproven.  But the key is in the idea that the racial differences, such as they may, make one group superior to the others and thus destined to rule.

The Wikipedia entry goes on to note that 

[t]he term racism is sometimes used to refer to preference for one’s own ethnic group (ethnocentrism),[2] fear of foreigners (xenophobia), views or preferences against interbreeding of the races (miscegenation),[3] and nationalism,[4], and/or a generalization of a specific group of people (stereotype); regardless of any explicit belief in superiority or inferiority embedded within such views or preferences.

That to me is more of “prejudice” than “racism.”  Check out this excerpt from the book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D, which I checked out of the high school media center last spring (and which was an amazingly interesting read):

Many people use the terms prejudice and racism interchangeably.  I do not, and I think it is important to make a distinction.  In his book Portraits of White Racism, David Wellman argues convincingly that limiting our understanding of racism to prejudice does not offer a sufficient explanation for the persistence of racism.  He defines racism as a “system of advantage based on race.”…In the context of the United States, this system clearly operates to the advantage of Whites and to the disadvantage of people of color.  Another related definition of racism…is “prejudice plus power.”

So it’s more than just thinking your race is the best.  It’s using that feeling of superiority to oppress others. 

Let’s see if we can incorporate some thoughts on this into the second round of racism blog entries.