Forbidden Regressions: Testing Racialism as a Scientific Hypothesis
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It is important to distinguish between racism and racialism. The word 'racism' emerged in the late-1930s with the first batch of Boasian antiracists, in what may be thought of as the heroic age of Boasian antiracism, when they began to agitate against National Socialism. It did the same work in the popular mind that 'race prejudice' had done earlier. For the intellectuals, at least for the small minority of Boasians who popularized it, it did a lot more work. The difference between race prejudice and racism was that the former singled out particularly hateful or enthusiastic instances or individuals for censure, whereas the latter pointed towards the systematic nature of racial discrimination and domination. The modern way of thinking about racism simply did not exist in that foreign country; race prejudice did not mean what racism would come to mean. The term itself took off with the 1960s antisystemic turn, and achieved its present hegemonic status in the 1990s — marking the rise of Boasian antiracism as the hegemonic ideology of Western elites in general and American elites in particular. The Google Ngram graph displayed below ends in 2008. Since then there has been a third surge, as
Forbidden Regressions: Testing Racialism as a Scientific Hypothesis
Forbidden Regressions: Testing Racialism as a…
Forbidden Regressions: Testing Racialism as a Scientific Hypothesis
It is important to distinguish between racism and racialism. The word 'racism' emerged in the late-1930s with the first batch of Boasian antiracists, in what may be thought of as the heroic age of Boasian antiracism, when they began to agitate against National Socialism. It did the same work in the popular mind that 'race prejudice' had done earlier. For the intellectuals, at least for the small minority of Boasians who popularized it, it did a lot more work. The difference between race prejudice and racism was that the former singled out particularly hateful or enthusiastic instances or individuals for censure, whereas the latter pointed towards the systematic nature of racial discrimination and domination. The modern way of thinking about racism simply did not exist in that foreign country; race prejudice did not mean what racism would come to mean. The term itself took off with the 1960s antisystemic turn, and achieved its present hegemonic status in the 1990s — marking the rise of Boasian antiracism as the hegemonic ideology of Western elites in general and American elites in particular. The Google Ngram graph displayed below ends in 2008. Since then there has been a third surge, as