Definitions of Racism

Explore

United Nations (UN)

Racial discrimination – “any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life”

Audre Lorde

Racism. The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance, manifest and implied.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.

(2007) “Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis and opposition in globalizing California.” University of California Press

Ibram X Kendi

What is racism? Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities. […] A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. […] There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

The core of color-blind racism, unlike Jim Crow racism, is explaining racial matters as the outcomes of nonracial dynamics […]. The four central frameworks of color-blind ideology are abstract liberalism (explaining racial matters in an abstract, decontextualized manner), naturalization (naturalizing racialized outcomes such as neighborhood segregation), cultural racism (attributing racial differences to cultural practices), and minimization of racism.

Grosfoguel

For Fanon, racism is a global power hierarchy of superiority and inferiority along the line of the human that has been politically produced and reproduced for centuries by the ‘modern/colonial, capitalist/patriarchal imperialist/Western-centric’ world system (Grosfoguel, 2011). People that are above the line of the human are socially recognized in their humanity as being human with rights and access to subjectivity and human/citizen/civil/labour rights. People below the line of the human are considered sub-human or non-human – that is to say, their humanity is in question and thus negated (Fanon, 2010).” (Grosfoguel 2019, 264-265)

(2019) Unsettling Eurocentrism in the Westernized University, edited by Julie Cupples and Ramon Grosfoguel