Racialization

Racialization is a social process by which a racial identity is assigned to a group of people based on various characteristics. These characteristics can be real or imagined and are shaped by history, prejudice, and the human tendency to assign abnormality to things that do not align with their own experience of the world. Racialization is a long process that stretches through centuries of history and has been traditionally applied to a minority group of people by the dominant culture around them. The dominant group often uses racialization as a means of staying dominant and maintaining control over the minority group, and in a number of cases, the racializing process leads to the group embracing the racial or ethnic identity ascribed to them. The process of racialization has existed for thousands of years as the ancient Greeks and Romans ascribed identities to non-Greek or non-Roman societies they considered inferior. Racialization persisted through the era of imperialism and later extended through the Age of Exploration as various European powers colonized parts of the world. Contemporary culture from the twentieth century continued to ascribe racialized identities to groups before scholars began to question and deconstruct the idea of race and its origins. The concept of racialization can also be applied to a variety of issues and topics outside the scope of ethnic and race studies, such as immigration, crime and policing, media studies, politics, housing patterns, and poverty.

Background

Historically, racialization has been utilized by an oppressive group to discriminate against minority peoples that looked different or lived differently from the oppressor. Some of the most famous ancient Greek philosophers propagated ideas about the superiority of the Greek people and ascribed inferior identities to those societies that lived outside Greece. They used flawed philosophies such as climate theory to account for the differences in physical and behavioral traits. Racialization has been defended from a scholarly and religious standpoint for thousands of years. When Europeans began colonizing various parts of the world, including the Americas and Africa, they encountered peoples who lived much differently from them. They soon began ascribing traits of inferiority to these societies to assume control over the lands on which they lived. Colonizers used religious arguments to justify their cruel treatment and “evident” superiority, calling Black people cursed by God for their dark skin and Native Americans weak for their spiritual beliefs and lifestyle.

Racialization was naturally followed by racism, which used the separatism of racialization to isolate and debase a given minority group. Throughout history, the process of racialization has been applied to every facet of an oppressing society and is found in historical texts, artworks, social behaviors, class distinctions, and economic opportunities. Through racialization, scientists used race to make certain claims about biological differences between races, leading to the pseudoscience known as scientific racism. Scientific racism was used to support and justify racist beliefs, and the concepts developed within the discipline were considered credible by the scientific community for hundreds of years.

Although racialization is often evoked in regard to minority peoples, the concept also applies to majority groups. Racialized ideas of Whiteness normally counter ideas about minorities, and historically, Whiteness was given positive associations compared to the negative associations transposed onto non-White individuals. Modern scholars have begun to examine the idea of “White privilege” experienced in White communities and how this privilege and the White experience have affected the course of history.

Overview

Racialization is a process that links certain ideas with race. A racialized society is one that operates under the assumptions made through racialization. Modern scholars identify racialization as a social construct that proliferated for a variety of reasons commonly tied to power dynamics. Racialization emerged from the social creations of difference and displacement that came from hierarchal concepts of “normal” and “abnormal.” The process uses labeling and stigmatization to link characteristics of people—such as skin color or religious beliefs—to the concept of race. By labeling a people as something “other” and organizing this other into a separate group, or race, an oppressor is able to stigmatize that group, or sanction it for nonconformity. Early sociologists examined stigmatization from a physical and social perspective, studying how humans used it to seek control and mark with disgrace any persons who displayed undesirable traits that differed from the norm and prevented them from gaining full social acceptance.

Racialization gives oppressors the power to marginalize a group and prevent that group from gaining full participation in the social, cultural, economic, and political institutions of society, inevitably leading to the process of racism. Racialization has led to other race-related injustices, such as stereotyping and racial profiling, which is the practice of making negative assumptions about and targeting a person solely based on their race or ethnicity. Over time, racialization has led to systemic racism in many societies, with minority groups frequently experiencing unfair treatment in many facets of society. For example, Black neighborhoods in the United States are often targets of over-policing, video surveillance, gang squad fixation, and punitive sentencing ramp-ups, leading to higher rates of incarceration among Black people. Scholarly debates also examine how racialization affects other areas of society, such as education, religion, and labor.

Many modern social scientists suggest that race has been socially constructed to perpetuate the acquisition of power and status. In fact, racialization as a sociological concept maintains that race does not exist, explaining that the only race is the human race, and instead focuses on examining how relations and interactions between groups become defined by this conception of race. Though pseudoscientific findings were used for decades to justify discriminatory practices, the racial and social inequities society creates have no basis in science or genetics.

Bibliography

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