العـنـصـــــــــــريــة

From "racial theory" to "racism"
Before considering racism, it is an important methodological point to distinguish historically when the concept of "racism" became known as such. Historians disagree largely when "race" emerged as a concept, ranging from those who believe aspects of it have always existed among humans, to those who place it as a concept separate from general distrust of "difference" (in which case it emerged either in the Age of Exploration or even as late as the 19th century). In any event, the division of people into discrete groups, usually based on external anatomical features or assumed geographic origin, and theories about how many "races" there were, and theories of how to "rank" these races against each other, existed long before they acquired any sort of distinct stigma against them. During the late-19th century, a number of thinkers emphasized that these views were morally and ethically unjust, but this was a significantly minority opinion. Even those who opposed institutions such as slavery often did so not on the basis of equality of races, but on overall equality in treatment of "mankind".

In the 20th century, however, there began a growth of thought that theories of racial "superiority" and "inferiority" were inherently problematic and wrong. Much of the discourse relating to racial theory of this sort came out of the United States in the years after the American Civil War, while European thinkers began to think of people in terms of linguistic "nations" more than they did "races". The term "racism", according to the Oxford English Dictionary, emerged in the early 1930s as distinct from the "theories of race" which had existed for at least a hundred years before that.

A turning point in racial thinking came with the rise of Adolf Hitler's Nazism, which built much of its political agenda upon the rhetoric of anti-Semitism and overt statements of racial superiority and inferiority. Full opposition to these ideas did not begin until the outbreak of World War II, and a large part of Allied propaganda efforts were in labeling Nazi Germany as a "racist" state, and distinguishing their own states from them. By the end of the war, the association of racism with the Nazis, and the genocidal policies they undertook, thoroughly established the meme that "racism" was something to be opposed. In the United States, the experience of the Civil Rights Movement further emphasized this point. At the present time, "racism" is now seen as something entirely to be opposed by almost all mainstream voices, though there is little agreement over what is "racism" and what is not. It is worth remembering, when looking at examples of "racism" from the past, that our 20th-century notions of "racism" as a concept, and it being a bad thing, are a relatively recent experience. In hindsight, many eminent scientists, philosophers, and statesmen appear "racist" by late-20th century standards, though the recognition of the historical nature of these judgements does not necessarily make them inaccurate or necessarily exonerate these figures or governments for their ideas or actions.

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Origins of racism
One view of the origins of racism emphasizes stereotypes, which psychologists generally believe are influenced by cultural factors. People generally respond to others differently based on what they know, which may include superficial characteristics often associated with race. A "white" person walking after dark in a primarily "black" neighborhood in an American city might be anxious for a combination of reasons. The same may be said for an African-American walking in a white neighborhood. A police officer who spends most of his day in that same city encountering criminality or hostility among people of a certain ethnic background might be expected to react negatively to a member of that same ethnic group whom he meets off-duty. A law-abiding African-American man is less likely than a law-abiding white man to view that same police officer as an ally and protector, and more as a threat to his or her personal safety and well-being because of a history in the U.S. of police authority and force being used discriminatorily, and more frequently with unjustified, deadly force against African-Americans. In both sets of cases, theories of conditioning may apply.

A famous experiment in cognitive psychology showed that the majority of Americans would remember a lower-status "black" man as having a knife in his hand, after viewing a picture which, in fact, showed a "white" man in a suit with a knife facing this lower-status man.

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. Others conflate recent forms of racism with earlier forms of ethnic and national conflict. In most cases, ethno-national conflict seems to owe to conflict over land and strategic resources. In some cases ethnicity and nationalism were harnessed to rally combatants in wars between great religious empires (for example, the Muslim Turks and the Catholic Austro-Hungarians). As Benedict Anderson has suggested in Imagined Communities, ethnic identity and ethno-nationalism became a source of conflict within such empires with the rise of print-capitalism.

Notions of race and racism, however, often have played central roles in such conflicts. Historically, when an adversary is identified as "other" based on notions of race or ethnicity particularly when "other" is construed to mean "inferior" the means employed by the self-presumed "superior" party to appropriate territory, human chattel, or gold or other material wealth often have been more ruthless, more brutal and less constrained by moral or ethical considerations. Indeed, based on such racist presumptions, the political or moral decision to enter into armed conflict can be made less weighty when one's potential adversaries are "other than," because their lives are perceived as having lesser importance, lesser value. In history, some examples of the brutalizing and dehumanizing effects of racism, are: the trading of smallpox-infested blankets among Native Americans as a weapon of bioterror in order to reduce their population.

In the western world, racism evolved, twinned with 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. As new peoples were encountered, fought, and ultimately subdued, theories about "race" began to develop, 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). Some people like Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda even argued that the Native Americans were natural slaves. In Asia, the Chinese and Japanese Empires were both strong colonial powers, with the Chinese making colonies and vassal states of much of mainland Asia, and the Japanese doing the same in the west Pacific. In both cases, the Asian imperial powers believed they were ethnically and racially superior to their vassals, and entitled to be their masters.