Dictionary

racialism en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• (Southern-England) audio

Etymology

From racial + -ism. Coined in 1882 based on the older use of "race" as a synonym of "nation, tribe, ethnic group", later senses (from 1890) from the use of "race" for racial categories.

Meanings

1. (countable, uncountable) The belief that humans can be categorized as belonging to distinct races, each race being characterized by fixed and heritable traits.
   • Never mentioning Delany by name, Vashon lambastes the “combatants” for their racialism, insisting that a belief in “a natural distinction between the white and colored races” only legitimates the racism of blacks’ oppressors. 2000, Robert S. Levine, chapter 2, in Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity, The University of North Carolina Press:
   • Yet such racialism was built upon the data of philology, inferring discrete racial groups from different speech varieties. 2020, Will Abberley, “Philology, Anglo-Saxonism, and Nation”, in Joanne Parker, Corinna Wagner, editors, The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism, page 329:
   • Racialism is at the heart of nineteenth-century attempts to develop a science of racial difference, but it appears to have been believed by others—like Hegel, before then, and Crummell and many Africans since—who have had no interest in developing scientific theories. 1992, Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture:
2. (countable, uncountable) Racism, the belief in the existence of different races and that some are superior to others; policies or practices which promote the dominance of one or more races over others.
   • This is The Lie of North American Superiority — an assumption based mainly on our superior living standard. […] This Lie of Superiority, this ill-disguised racialism in us who are always denouncing racialism in other people, is more than an unpleasant breach of good manners. It has deep and evil effects upon the affairs of the world. 1949, Manitoba School Journal, page 19:
   • Racialism and ultra-nationalism are a major part of the fascist doctrine. We all recall the Hitler emphasis on the Aryan race and I think you can visualize for a moment the Nazi propagandist telling the German people, "You are superior!" Nobody argues with this. If someone confronts you and says, "You know, I am firmly convinced you are the superior type," you don't deny it. […] So the selling of racialism is not nearly as difficult as it might on the surface appear to be. Coupled with this racialism, the ultra-nationalism suggests that if a race is superior why then should it confine itself to the limited territory in which if finds itself. 1959 September 23, E. B. Ader, “Conflicting Political and Economic Systems”, in Naval War College Review, page 8:
3. (UK, countable, dated, uncountable) Tribalism, nationalism.
   • The modern dogma of nationalism, as maintained by a class of theoretic politicians (and which might more properly be called racialism [italics in original] — leaving nationalism to denote the recent modified application of socialism in pol. econ.) 1890, Alden's Manifold Cyclopedia of Knowledge and Language, volume 25:

Forms

Deriveds

nonracialism · ethnoracialism · antiracialism

Relateds

racialist · race realism

Synonyms

racism