Talk:racism

Definitions

The 10 items (except #3) are examples of racism, not distinct senses of the word.

A list of examples of racist befiefs or actions is not a definition. A definition should tell us the defining characteristics of racism.

6, 7 and 8 suggest that "cultural dominance" a defining characteristic, but when minority groups beat up on one another, is it not racism?24.64.166.191 05:48, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

1. they are distinct senses of the word, and it's important that they be enumerated, since people sometimes mean one while people infer another.
2. these are the defining characteristics.
3. well, according to some (e.g., those) definitions, it is not racism (hence terms like reverse racism or racialism or racial aggression to refer to minority groups attacking each other or attacking the dominant cultural group(s)). According to other definitions, it is. The word is constantly in dispute with regards to its meaning, and it's important that the Wiktionary try to represent all of the definitions in common occurrence, keeping them distinct where they are used in distinct senses. 167.88.178.70 18:51, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Vandlism

I am goign to vandalize this reverse racist mess of an article.

Unsigned comment from 20:37, June 9, 2006 User:S. C. Berkeley

Um, that might actually be a good idea. It is...different from our typical entry right now. --Connel MacKenzie T C 22:45, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

How about something like this

Racism:

1. A personal or collective belief in the differing abilities and/or attributes of racial groupings, usually with the proponent(s) believing in their own racial superiority.
2. Any action that physically manifests an individual or collective subscription to the above belief.
3. Any system or policy that engenders either of the above.

Proposed edit

I would like to add "bigotry" to the "see also" list but there is no "edit" tab for this word. - April 11, 2007

Usage notes

The usage notes have no sources, and no basis in fact. Either someone needs to source them, or they need to be removed.

That's not true.. --BiT 14:28, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

It is in fact true that they have no sources and never have. This is a fact that should probably be remedied and removing them in the meantime is not altogether unreasonable so long as we are not agreed about them. Jun-Dai 02:46, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

Way too verbose!

I edited this article because there were about eight different definitions, which ultimately fell into one of two major ideas. It is my personal opinion that the best definitions are concise, clear, and descriptive.

If I was wrong and I broke the rules, just revert the article.

Act of classifying based on race

was "Racism - The act of distinguishing or classifying a person or group of people into a category based exclusively on their race."

IE - All people belonging the the X race, please form a line to the left.

All people NOT of the X race, please form a line to the right.

The statement which I just made is an example of racism in it's purest and most unadulterated form. I never expressed any love or hate, like or dislike for race X or any other race. I merely CLASSIFIED THEM INTO A GROUP on the merits of NOTHING else except for their race.

The definition of racism which is something similar to:

"To categorize a person or group of people on nothing but the merits of their race", dosen't seem to be found anywhere...

71.50.95.254 05:49, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Missing definition?

Shouldn't this have a parallel to the following definition from the sexism page? "Disadvantage or unequal opportunity arising from the cultural dominance of one gender over the other." A detailed description of this idea can be found in the Sociological section of the Racism Wikipedia article which I can't link because it complains when I do. 85.211.190.171 06:59, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

RFC discussion: June–July 2007

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for cleanup (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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racism

The "usage notes" are longer than the dictionary entry. This is becoming an encyclopedic entry, and need to be cleaned up. —This unsigned comment was added by Littlebum2002 (talk • contribs) 21:47, 15 June 2007 (UTC).

I tried to clean it up, but there are probably NPOV problems now. More eyes welcome. —Ruakh_TALK 01:21, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

I don't think the fact that the usage notes are longer than the entry should bother us, especially for such a term, where the usage is subject to so much debate and the term is so frequently used with a fairly precise definition. Many of the usage notes in American Heritage (at least online) are longer than the terms' definitions, and they have concerns about concision (at least in their printed editions) that we don't have.

The usage notes as they were were not encyclopedic. People coming to a dictionary expect to understand a word's meaning and how it's used (along with pronunciation, etymology, and other things), and many dictionaries employ usage notes, quotations, and example sentences for that reason. Many terms that cannot be effectively summed up in a section shorter than the definition, and I think we should include racism among them because of the many common usages of the term that are not encapsulated in mainstream dictionaries.

The current usage notes section is just a list of rather unclear ideas about the term, some of which don't belong on that page. For example, I don't really think reverse racism deserves more than a simple mention; the paragraph currently there belongs in some form on the reverse racism article itself and not on the article for racism. Personally I feel like the usage notes have gotten significantly worse than they were before, but I don't exactly have an unbiased opinion (even were such a thing possible). That said, they should probably just be removed until someone with more interest in citing their sources than I is willing to take a stab at them. I've always been more interested in arguing ideas than in researching (the latter of which is much more valuable and certainly more appropriate in this forum). Jun-Dai 02:50, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

where do we quote Pratt

According to https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/01/05/260006815/the-ugly-fascinating-history-of-the-word-racism Oxford attributes this to Richard Henry Pratt in 1902:

Segregating any class or race of people apart from the rest of the people kills the progress of the segregated people or makes their growth very slow. Association of races and classes is necessary to destroy racism and classism.

I want to quote this as an example. Would it be the first (belief of intrinsic attributes), second (belief of superior/inferior), third (prejudice or discrimination), or fourth (hierarchal system)?

The four definitions are pretty similar in meaning and it doesn't seem like it would always be clear as to the context in which people are using them. 1/2/4 don't have examples and 3 only has Amamoo's.

I know we don't usually cite dictionaries, but perhaps that could be useful in establishing when it was that these different subtleties of meaning were first recognized? ScratchMarshall (talk) 20:07, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

As Equinox remarked a while ago in the Tea Room about racial supremacy (subsequently deleted as SOP), words like this often end up being poorly defined. People add examples of phenomena as definitions (when they are not distinct senses) and/or fear to tread in and clean up the entry. You see on this page there's been discussion of the difficulty of defining this since at least 2006.
Our definitions could use work. Some people use racism for any discrimination by one racial/ethnic group against another. Other people use it to refer to a structural / institutionalized / systemic discrimination, which our entry doesn't reflect. Some of the information in the usage notes about implicit vs explicit racism should perhaps be in the definitions (not sure). I don't understand how def 4 is a definition of racism. Def 1 is conceptually different and possibly dated or limited to sociological jargon.
I will try to survey literature and other reference works sometime soon and see if I can make any suggestions as to revising the definition(s).
The quotation you're looking at seems like sense 3 but could also be 2. - -sche (discuss) 22:13, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

Definitions 2

As of 2/23/20, the current first definition of racism is:

Belief in distinct human races, and that they have different inherent attributes or abilities, and generally that some are superior and others inferior.

I recommend that this be changed to:

Unwarranted belief that distinct humans races have different inherent abilities, and that those supposed differences make different races superior or inferior to other races in some way.

The original definition seems to imply that the it is racist to merely believe in races, or to believe that races have physical differences (e.g. nose shape, hair texture, average height).

I recommend adding the word “unwarranted” because if I make an observation about a race that I know to be true because I have taken some time to look into the matter (e.g. “The vast majority of protagonists in bestselling novels are white” or “A greater percentage of African-Americans are Christians than the percentage of white people who are Christians ” (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/23/black-americans-are-more-likely-than-overall-public-to-be-christian-protestant/. https://www.prri.org/research/american-religious-landscape-christian-religiously-unaffiliated/.)) then that’s not racism, but fact, as far as I know.

As of 2/23/20, the second definition of racism is: The policy, practice or (e.g. government or political) program of promoting this belief and promoting the dominance of one race over others. I recommend this be changed to: The systemic oppression of one race by one or more other races due to this belief.

I think this second definition is trying to say that racism is a thing enforced by structured, coordinated effort by institutions and social structures, and that racism is something that is meant to oppress a certain race or races. I don’t think these ideas are as clearly stated as they could be, though. — This unsigned comment was added by Kylie20 (talk • contribs) at 00:50, 24 February 2020‎.

You make some good points that the entry has shortcomings. As remarked in the section above, this is a tricky word to define. I'd be wary of adding "unwarranted", because racists think their beliefs are warranted and that white people are objectively superior, etc. A smaller tweak to sense 1 would be to change it to "Belief that there are distinct human races which have different inherent [etc as before]". It's interesting to look at how other reference works handle this. Our sister project Wikipedia says (although, I notice, only since this year) that it's "belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to physical appearance"; Merriam-Webster says it's a belief that one's race is a "primary determinant" of one's traits and abilities. Dictionary.com says it's the belief that "inherent differences" among races "determine cultural or individual achievement". The ADL defines it as the belief that one's "social and moral traits are predetermined by [...] inborn biological characteristics". (All include a second clause saying that this belief leads to belief that some races are superior.) This idea, that appearance-based characteristics determine one's behaviorial traits or intellectual capacities or the like, is not covered as well or clearly as it could be by our current defs. You are also right the entry could do better in noting that at least some people use racism to mean a systemic phenomenon; this is currently mentioned in the usage notes; it is tricky, though, as other people use the word in a way that includes personal, non-systemic actions, and one has to decide whether it's better to handle that within the same sense or make a separate sense. I'll see if I can think of possible improvements. Additional input from you or other editors is welcome. - -sche (discuss) 05:58, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

I revised def 1 to "Belief that there are distinct human races with inherent differences which determine their abilities, and generally that some are superior and others inferior." This could be revised further. I also tweaked def 2, but I think there's still a lot of room for improving it and the usage notes; I'm hesitant to entirely drop the existing wording and simply replace it with your proposal, but when I consider ways of incorporating something like your definition or what the usage notes are getting at into one of the definitions, I notice how tricky it is to clearly distinguish each sense from the others. - -sche (discuss) 06:27, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Merriam-Webster updating their definition

Merriam-Webster is working to update (but as I understand it, has not yet updated) their own dictionary entry to better cover the "systemic" aspect of racism, something we also have struggled to figure out how best to cover, in several discussions above. - -sche (discuss) 19:11, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

I think the current entry works out fine. It mentions the traditional definition of the word while also making note that some (but not all) people like to include a systemic aspect to the concept. I feel like this has the potential to very quickly become a hotbed of edit-warring if too much more than that is done. The definition as it stands is as objective as it's going to get. 74.83.67.146 21:57, 9 June 2020 (UTC)