Racism as an ideology

SIGNIFICANCE: Racism can be described as an ideology—a belief that helps to maintain the status quo. More specifically, “racism” refers to the belief that one race is superior to other races in significant ways and that the superior race is entitled, by virtue of its superiority, to dominate other races and to enjoy a larger share of society’s wealth and status.

Race, according to almost all scientists, is a socially defined concept rather than a biologically determined reality. “Race” is therefore real only in the sense that certain groups have, for whatever reason, decided to categorize people according to certain aspects (arbitrary and even superficial aspects) of their physical appearance. Terms such as “Black” and “White,” then, must also be viewed as socially, rather than biologically, meaningful distinctions.

Sociologist Howard Schuman has defined racism as the belief that there are clearly distinguishable human races, that these races differ not only in superficial physical characteristics but also innately in important psychological traits, and that the differences are such that some races are superior to others. According to this view, it follows that the advantages which members of the superior race enjoy with respect to housing, employment, education, income and wealth, and status and power are attributable to their natural abilities rather than discrimination or oppression. Consequently, according to this view, racial inequality is no reason to change any of society’s institutionalized ways of doing things; the social structure can be maintained. Racism is, then, an ideology: a belief that rationalizes the status quo.

Prior to the mid-twentieth century, the prevailing form of racism was the belief that Black people were genetically inferior, especially with respect to intelligence. Since that time, the view that Black people are inferior to White people has persisted, but racist White people have changed their minds about the cause of the inferiority. Schuman cites a helpful statistic: In 1942, 42 percent of a national sample of White individuals said they believed that Black people were as intelligent as White people; by 1956, 78 percent of White individuals agreed that Black individuals were as intelligent.

The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) found, in 1991, that 14 percent agreed that Black people were disadvantaged in housing, income, and education because they have less inborn ability. The remaining 86 percent, however, did not all believe that Black and White individuals were biologically and psychologically equal and that the differences in housing, income, and education were attributable to discriminatory social structures. Only 40 percent said the differences were attributable “mainly to discrimination.” Fifty-five percent said that the difference existed “because most Black people just don’t have the motivation or will power to pull themselves up out of poverty.” If racism is the belief that one race is superior in significant ways to other races, and if “free will” is considered to be a significant trait (and it is if differences in education and income are attributable to differences in free will) then such a belief is an example of racism. Schuman, analyzing similar data prior to the 1970s, concluded that “the phrase 'White racism' appears wholly appropriate.”

Psychologist William Ryan (1976) concurs. The old-fashioned ideology was that Black people were genetically defective. The modern ideology is that they are environmentally defective, that the defects are caused by “the malignant nature of poverty, injustice, slum life, and racial difficulties.” Ryan notes that “the stigma, the defect, the fatal difference—though derived in the past from environmental forces—is still located within the victim, inside his skin.”

The ideology of racism has injured not only those in “nonwhite races” but those in certain white ethnic groups as well. The historian John Higham (Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925, 1955) traced the history of “race thinking” about European immigrants to the United States:

Several generations of intellectuals took part in transforming the vague and somewhat benign racial concepts of romantic nationalism into doctrines that were precise, malicious, and plausibly applicable to European immigration. The task was far from simple; at every point, the race-thinkers confronted the liberal and cosmopolitan barriers of Christianity and American democracy.

Challenges to the Ideology

The most direct attack on the ideology of racism has been challenges to the very concept of race. If there are not in fact different “races” of people, then obviously all arguments about the superiority and inferiority of various races are false. Science has challenged the concept of race. The sociologist James W. Vander Zanden (1983) has traced the progress of science’s views from the “fixed type school” to the “breeding population school” and ultimately to the “no-race school.” The fixed type school held the view that “races are relatively fixed and immutable hereditary groupings that reach back into antiquity.” The breeding population school held the view that races start with a common genetic heritage and that geographic and social isolation (breeding barriers), mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift gave rise to “more or less stable, differentiated gene pools among humankind”—populations that differ with respect to the frequency of certain genetic traits. The “no-race school” denies that races, as discrete biological entities, are real.

Race nevertheless remains a social reality. People are socially defined as belonging to different races, and they are treated differently based upon these social definitions. The differences in treatment produce differences in outcomes for the different races, and these different outcomes are then used as evidence to support the ideology of racism. Consequently, the ideology of racism can also be challenged by examining the way any social institution functions. If the institutions of education, health care, religion, the family, the polity, or the economy treated all races equally, then differences among races with respect to those institutions might be attributable to racial differences. If those institutions treat people in different races unequally, then these differences in treatment may be sufficient to explain any differences among groups, and any racial explanation would more likely be an expression of the ideology of racism.

History of the Ideology

The ideology that one race is superior to others, particularly with respect to intelligence, has existed for thousands of years. The sociologists Brewton Berry and Henry L. Tischler quote a letter from Cicero, the Roman statesman and orator, to Atticus (c. 100 BCE): “Do not obtain your slaves from Britain because they are so stupid and so utterly incapable of being taught that they are not fit to form a part of the household of Athens.” Almost two thousand years later, the French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau returned the insult, complaining about the Italians, as well as the Irish and “cross-bred Germans and French” who were immigrating to the United States. They were, in de Gobineau’s opinion, “the human flotsam of all ages . . . decadent ethnic varieties.”

Just as de Gobineau was not deterred by Cicero’s low opinion of northwestern Europeans, so are many of the descendants of those Italians, Irish, Germans, French (and others) not deterred by de Gobineau’s opinion from thinking that they constitute a superior race. Consequently, one of these descendants, psychologist R. Meade Bache, in an 1895 study entitled “Reaction Time with Reference to Race,” reached the conclusion that White people were intellectually superior to Black and Indigenous peoples, even though White people had the slowest reaction times of the three groups. Bache interpreted the results to mean that White individuals “were slower because they belonged to a more deliberate and reflective race.”

Bache was the first of a long line of so-called scientists who managed to confirm the superiority of their own race. After him came the famous psychologist Robert Yerkes, who developed intelligence tests for World War I recruits and concluded that the tests proved the intellectual inferiority of Black people. Then Carl Brigham used the Yerkes data to prove that more recent European immigrants were genetically intellectually inferior to earlier European immigrants. This ideology of racism has continued to the present day, when many are still convinced that White people are intellectually superior to other races because they average higher scores on IQ tests.

During the last four centuries, prejudices toward Black people have changed, but such prejudices still exist. As scientific research slowly convinces many people that a particular prejudice is factually incorrect, informed people begin to laugh and scorn when it is expressed, and others become ashamed to express it. Yet as that particular prejudice falls into disuse, another is invented, often by respected and influential people, to take its place. This occurs because continuing discrimination requires prejudice to rationalize it. In the future, if racial discrimination continues, so will racism as an ideology.

Bibliography

Frederickson, George M. Racism: A Short History. Rev. ed. Princeton UP, 2015.

Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. W. W. Norton, 1981.

"The Ideology of Racism: Misusing Science to Justify Racial Discrimination." UN Chronicle, vol. 44, no. 3, Sept. 2007, www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/ideology-racism-misusing-science-justify-racial-discrimination. Accessed 15 Dec. 2024.

Ryan, William. Blaming the Victim. Rev. ed. Vintage Books, 1976.

“Scientific Racism.” Harvard Library, library.harvard.edu/confronting-anti-black-racism/scientific-racism. Accessed 15 Dec. 2024.

Vander Zanden, James W. American Minority Relations: The Sociology of Race and Ethnic Groups. 4th ed. Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.