racism
- 1Prejudice or discrimination directed at people on the basis of their race or ethnicity; a single act of such discrimination.
Racism in the housing market kept many families out of certain neighborhoods for decades.
She filed a formal complaint after experiencing racism from a coworker.
Similardiscrimination, prejudice, bigotry
Note
Prejudice can be counted: besides the mass noun, racism names a single act and takes a plural. Bernard Guerin's How to Rethink Human Behavior (2016) speaks of "the little racisms" a student met at college, which are small incidents rather than a doctrine. Use the plural for repeated slights and keep the word uncountable for the general phenomenon.
- 2The belief that humanity divides into distinct races whose inherited differences determine their abilities, with some races held to be superior and others inferior.
Nineteenth-century racism dressed up its claims of inferiority in the language of science.
Their pamphlets spread a crude racism that ranked peoples by supposed inborn worth.
Similarracialism
Note
An -ism borrowed whole from French racisme, built from race plus the suffix that names doctrines. In 1932 Sisley Huddleston capitalized it beside Fascism, treating Racism as a named creed of the day. That doctrinal framing sets this meaning apart from everyday prejudice. Here racism is a set of claims about human nature, something a person can hold, spread or, as Bill Clinton writes in My Life, lose.
- 3The policies, practices, or systems, such as governmental or political ones, that promote the belief in superior and inferior races or the dominance of one or more races over others.
Apartheid was a system of racism enforced through law for nearly fifty years.
Reformers traced the racism embedded in lending rules that denied loans to whole neighborhoods.
Similardiscrimination
Note
Here the word moves from what people believe to how institutions work. David T. Wellman's Portraits of White Racism (1993) puts it sharply: racism is less about hostility than "the defense of a system from which advantage is derived on the basis of race." The sense readily takes an owner, as in Tyler T. Schmidt's phrase "the US government's racism," and verbs like embed and enforce.
Practice
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Origin
Borrowed from French "racisme," equivalent to "race" plus the suffix "-ism."