O racism is a way of prejudice and discrimination based on a controversial term, which is sociologically revised and from which genetics also begins a revision: race. In the nineteenth century, it was understood that the skin color and geographical origin of individuals promoted a differentiation of races.
Mixing culture and physical aspects, the first anthropologists established a hierarchy of races, which sometimes reinforced the domination of white European peoples over populations of other non-European ethnic groups.
O racism it is an evil that affects the lives of many people and, as an outdated and wrong understanding relationship, it must be overcome.
Read too: Ethnocentrism - worldview based on culture itself
racism and prejudice
There are conceptual differences between the terms racism and prejudice. O preconception, at the root of the word, is the formulation of a concept about something without first knowing it. Prejudice, for example, may be judging that a food is bad because of its physical appearance. Bringing to social relations, prejudice consists of
prejudgment of something without actually knowing it.In social relationships, prejudice can happen because of the sexuality (prejudging a homosexual person); of gender (judge a woman as inferior to a man, or a transgender person); gives conditionphysics (judge a disabled or short person, for example, as incapable); and of the breed (skin color).
![The Black Lives Matter movement emerged in the US after barbaric acts committed by white police against blacks. (Translation: Black Lives Matter) [1]](/f/0eef0c11c9f79c9e98ee969b5fcd5b5d.jpg)
When prejudice is motivated by skin color of a person, we call it racism. Racism is, therefore, a form of cruel prejudice that still affects a large portion of the world's population. It is important to emphasize that there are no big differences genetic between people of different ethnicities|1|, and even if this difference existed, this would not be sufficient reason to justify the racial prejudice.
In the most acute forms, racial prejudice can serve as a pretext to motivate physical aggression or verbal, in addition to causing moral damage and even unjust persecution and imprisonment of people, especially of black people.
See too: Difference between ethics and morals
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Origin and causes of racism
We can find the most remote origins of racism in human history and in anthropology. THE Europe had a cultural development quite different from that of other continents. The European peoples dominated navigation and started, in the 15th century, a movement of maritime expansion that took them to other continents. The contact of Europeans with Asians and Africans already existed, and the way of seeing other non-white peoples and non-European cultures as inferior, too.
THE arrival of Europeans to the American continent it resulted in a way of seeing those different from them and totally devoid of white cultural traits, which Europeans considered to be civilizing. Such scenario served for them to appropriate the American territory and tried to acculturate their natives, pushing their language and culture to them. The American continent has become a true European company.
As if that wasn't enough, the Europeans started a process of capturing Africans so that they could work as slaves in their new company. The enslavement process was based on a race hierarchy ideology, even at the level of collective consciousness, which caused millions of Africans to be captured and subjected to slave labor.
In this movement, there was also an unconscious idea that the natives of the Americas and, later, those of Oceania and East Asia were inferior. when seeing other peoples as inferiors, Europeans saw them as animals or even objects.
This first movement of Europe's onslaught on other lands became known as colonialism. To justify the domination, the Europeans used the conception that the pagan peoples lived in sin and needed the European religion to develop spiritually.
![The outdated idea that the white race is superior is the result of a nineteenth-century racist pseudoscience. (Translation: No to White Supremacy) [2]](/f/3f9b67e8bb4578217ff3311d990f00bf.jpg)
In the 19th century, Europe started a second movement of onslaught on other continents called the neocolonialism. During this period, the natural sciences and the social sciences were developing at full speed.
The religious mentality of two or three centuries before was no longer sufficient to justify an undertaking as large as the division of African and Asian lands among Europeans. With that, the anthropology emerges as a science capable of providing an intellectual apparatus that would justify the cultural and territorial domination of the peoples inhabiting the new territories by the Europeans.
The first anthropological theories, developed by the English philosopher, biologist and anthropologist Herbert Spencer, and by the English anthropologist and geographer Edward Burnett Tylor, were consistent with European dominance over new peoples. The anthropologists mentioned created a theory inspired by the biology of Charles Darwin and applied to peoples. This theory later became known as social evolutionism or social Darwinism. They believed that there was an ethnic development among peoples, and this development could be observed by the culture.
In the view of the theorists, there was a superior culture and inferior cultures. With this, they found that there was also a hierarchy of races, which could be observed by the culture of each race. In this way, with a ethnocentrist and eurocentrist vision, they considered European culture and race as superior. Next, on the scale of hierarchy, would come the culture and race of the Orientals; in third place would be the American Indians; and, finally, black Africans.
That theorypseudoscientific it was used, for decades, to justify the rule of whites over other territories and populations. Furthermore, it left behind the racism that persists in our society to this day.
Also access: Xenophobia - aversion of foreign people
racism in Brazil
despite the abolition of slavery to have occurred in 1888 (a relatively late period if we consider that the same, in the Latin American neighbors, happened before 1860; in the United States, in 1865; and in England, in 1834), racism persists as martyrdom for the black population to this day. Abolition here and elsewhere was not planned. There was no plan to guide, welcome and educate the newly freed slaves.
THE lack of attention to the black population, who suddenly found themselves without housing and food, resulted in their marginalization. It is noteworthy that the Lei Áurea, which entered into force on May 13, 1888, did not guarantee that all slaves were, in practice, freed. Many slaves, without options or even without information about their freed status, were subjected to slavery in Brazil even after abolition.
O stigma of slavery coupled with marginalization of those people who, without anything to eat and where to live, went to live in the hills, in the ghettos and often resort to crime to survive, resulted in the exclusion situation that leads to racism nowadays.
One of the greatest sociologists in Brazil, Florestan Fernandes, carried out studies on the insertion of blacks in class society in Brazil. According to Fernandes, the black population was, even in the 1970s, subjected to the exclusion that began after abolition. Brazilian capitalism had not inserted the black population into social classes, leaving only the subaltern spaces for it. This can be verified by the data that persist in our country to the present day.
The data listed below, taken from the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD)|2|, reveal the social gap between blacks and whites in our country:
While whites earn, on average, BRL 2814 monthly, browns earn BRL 1606, and blacks earn BRL 1570, according to the 2017 PNAD.
According to the 2018 PNAD, the unemployment rate among blacks and browns (14.6% and 13.8%, respectively) was higher than the general unemployment rate (11.9%).
PNAD data from 2015 show that blacks and browns represent 54% of the Brazilian population. However, they represent 75% of the poorest 10% of the population and 17.8% of the richest 1% of the population.
Among blacks and browns, the illiteracy rate is around 9.9%, while illiteracy among whites is around 4.2%.
22.9% of whites over 25 have a higher education degree; among blacks and browns, this figure is 9.3%.
Also access: How was the life of ex-slaves after the Golden Law?
structural racism
All data presented in the previous topic show the racial difference in Brazil. Blacks, browns and indigenous people are excluded from effective participation in public spaces. This fact shows us a first clue to understanding structural racism. Far from being that explicit racism, evidenced in prejudiced speeches and even in aggressive attitudes, structural racism is the one that is subtly inserted into our daily lives.
Structural racism maintains a fine line and often difficult to perceive between blacks and whites. It excludes, but does not show itself as exclusive. Structural racism is so attached to the structures of our society that goes unnoticed by most people.
In addition to the data, which show the social difference between blacks and whites (and this is part of the structural racism), we have other factors that must be exposed for this phenomenon to be understood. Our society as a whole regards blackness as something inferior. The standard of beauty preached by the media is a white standard.
There is a white-line normativity that define white men and white women as beautiful and exclude the physical characteristics of black people from the standard of beauty: blue eyes, thin nose and straight hair. In fact, curly hair, a phenotypic characteristic of black people, is considered “bad”.
Linguistically, structural racism also marks its presence. More symbolic and less noticeable brand is still in the euphemisms used to refer to black people with black skin. Rather than referring to them as black or black, there is a popular urge to use other words such as "dark skinned" or "person of color". This feature, in Portuguese, is called euphemism.
The euphemism is used to soften a pejorative or aggressive adjective in order to make it more socially acceptable. If euphemisms are used to refer to black people, it means that blackness is considered inferior, bad or aggressive, which is another sign of structural racism.
Grades
|1| check out on here the subject of the periodical the country about the subject.
|2| The data collected in the magazine's matter Exam can be checked on here.
Image credits
[1] arindabanerjee / Shutterstock
[2] Christopher Penler / Shutterstock
by Francisco Porfirio
Sociology Professor