For the use of scientific techniques and hypotheses to attempt to support or justify belief in racism, see Scientific racism.
Not to be confused with Racism.
Racialism is the belief that the human species is naturally divided into races, that are ostensibly distinct biological categories. Most dictionaries define the term racialism as synonymous with racism.[1]
Definitions and differencesEdit
W. E. B. Du Bois, 1918
In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois said that racialism is the philosophical position that races existed, and that collective differences existed among such categories, the races.[citation needed] He further stated that racism required advancing the argument that one race is superior to other races of human beings. In In My Father’s House (1992), Kwame Anthony Appiah summarized Du Bois's philosophical stance that racialism is value-neutral term and that racism is a value-charged term.
Today, some anthropologists and geneticists point to studies that suggest racialist beliefs are both compatible and incompatible with modern population genetics.[clarification needed][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]
According to Oxford Dictionaries Online, racialism is "another term for racism".[9] The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines racialism as "a theory that race determines human traits and capacities" and defines "racism" as "a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race".[10]
In discussing how race is used by scientists, Takezawa et al. summarized the finding of a 2014 interdisciplinary workshop on scientific ethics by saying:
"We need to anticipate the various potential social and ethical problems entailed in population descriptors. Scientists have a social responsibility to convey their research findings outside of their communities as accurately as possible, and to consider how the public may perceive and respond to the descriptors that appear in research papers and media articles."[11]
In Racial Culture: A Critique (2005), Richard T. Ford claimed that although "there is no necessary correspondence between the ascribed identity of race and one's culture or personal sense of self" and "group difference is not intrinsic to members of social groups but rather contingent o[n] the social practices of group identification", the social practices of identity politics may coerce individuals into the "compulsory" enactment of "prewritten racial scripts".[12]
^ "The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States" (PDF). The American Journal of Human Genetics. Retrieved December 22, 2014. The relationship between self-reported identity and genetic African ancestry, as well as the low numbers of self-reported African Americans with minor levels of African ancestry, provide insight into the complexity of genetic and social consequences of racial categorization, assortative mating, and the impact of notions of "race" on patterns of mating and self-identity in the US. Our results provide empirical support that, over recent centuries, many individuals with partial African and Native American ancestry have "passed" into the white community, with multiple lines of evidence establishing African and Native American ancestry in self-reported European Americans.
^ Carl Zimmer. "White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier". The New York Times. Retrieved December 24, 2014. On average, the scientists found, people who identified as African-American had genes that were only 73.2 percent African. European genes accounted for 24 percent of their DNA, while .8 percent came from Native Americans. Latinos, on the other hand, had genes that were on average 65.1 percent European, 18 percent Native American, and 6.2 percent African. The researchers found that European-Americans had genomes that were on average 98.6 percent European, .19 percent African, and .18 Native American. These broad estimates masked wide variation among individuals.