I have a theory about racism. While I know racism is real, I think a lot of what passes for racism is actually a misdiagnosis of ethnocentrism (the idea that one’s culture is superior to others).
Each culture has its own unique worldview, values, and practices. Humans tend to be suspicious of worldviews/values/practices that differ from their own. In some cases, we can even despise all or some aspect of certain cultures (often for illegitimate reasons such as “I had an experience in which a person of X race did me wrong, therefore I don’t like people of X race”). Many times, the skin color of the people in the culture we despise differs from our own as well. But is the color of their skin the cause of the animosity? No, I don’t think so. The person from culture A with skin color B despises people from culture X with skin color Y, not because he hates skin color Y, but because skin color Y serves to identify the people who belong to the culture who thinks/acts in ways he despises. In other words, race is incidental to the animosity, not the source.
Think about it. When someone says, “I hate Chinese people,” and you ask them why, you will often be given a list of behaviors s/he believes are typical of Chinese people—behaviors s/he does not like. It is the behavior/culture—not the skin color—that is being despised. Indeed, if someone of their same race did the same things, s/he would despise that person just as s/he despises the Chinese (if s/he did not feel the same way about someone of his/her own race who behaves the same way, then that would be good reason to think s/he is truly racist). Indeed, you often find animosity between sub-groups of the same race for either cultural or political reasons (e.g. French-German animosity), and yet no one labels it racism. But if the French had dark skin, people would call it racism. This tells me that our definition of racism is misguided. Racism is animosity toward others primarily due to the color of their skin or their ethnicity.
Of course, no matter what we call it, and no matter what motivates the hate, it is wrong.
Thinking to Believe 
November 19, 2011 at 1:57 am
In some of my college classes, racism was often defined in terms of socio-economic and political disparity. That only if a people of a certain race (as a whole, or at least in the bell curve) were functionally unequal, then that constituted racism.
It didn’t have to do with any perceived cultural or ethnic animosity, except only in the idea that the race “on top” naturally looked out for it’s own and wielded power to keep other races subjugated. This would, as was taught, make all people of a certain race (the top race, as it were) racist, being part of a society that instituted and maintained racist policies (even if only unofficial). The opposote being anyone of the so-called subjugated races could not be racist because they were the ones suffering from the unequality.
What you are defining was more often, in such classes, labeled bigotry or some form of -centrism.
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November 26, 2011 at 1:02 pm
That sounds like a very strange (or at least a very limited) definition of racism. Most people understand racism to be an attitude, disposition, or set of beliefs a person has about another race. Indeed, the sociological definition seems flawed at its heart. Imagine two races living in the same culture, one of which prizes education and the other does not. Neither has any animosity toward the other, but embraces each other as equals. Clearly one will have an economic advantage over the other, however. The resultant cultural disparity is not due to anything other than the fact that each culture has different values on education, which determines their role in society.
Jason
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