Racism consists of several different and often related ideologies centered around the concept of race. Modern variants are often based in social perceptions of biological differences between peoples. These can take the form of social actions, practices or beliefs, or political systems that consider different races to be ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities. It may also hold that members of different races should be treated differently.[1][2][3]
Among the questions about how to define racism are the question of whether to include forms of discrimination that are unintentional, such as making assumptions about preferences or abilities of others based on racial stereotypes, whether to include symbolic or institutionalized forms of discrimination such as the circulation of ethnic stereotypes through the media, and whether to include the socio-political dynamics of social stratification that sometimes have a racial component.
In sociology and psychology, some definitions only include consciously malignant forms of discrimination.[4][5] Some definitions of racism also include discriminatory behaviors and beliefs based on cultural, national, ethnic, caste, or religious stereotypes.[2][6] One view holds that racism is best understood as 'prejudice plus power' because without the support of political or economic power, prejudice would not be able to manifest as a pervasive cultural, institutional or social phenomenon.[7][8][9]
While race and ethnicity are considered to be separate phenomena in contemporary social science, the two terms have a long history of equivalence in popular usage and older social science literature. Racism and racial discrimination are often used to describe discrimination on an ethnic or cultural basis, independent of whether these differences are described as racial. According to the United Nations convention, there is no distinction between the terms racial discrimination and ethnic discrimination, and superiority based on racial differentiation is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous, and that there is no justification for racial discrimination, in theory or in practice, anywhere.[10]
In history, racism is often seen as a component behind racial segregation in certain U.S. states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and South Africa under apartheid.[11] Practices and ideologies of racism are condemned by the United Nations in the Declaration of Human Rights.[12] It was also an important part of the political and ideological underpinning of The Holocaust, but also in certain colonial contexts.