The word racism only became common in the 1930s, to describe Nazi ideology
Prejudice by ancestry is old, but the word racism is surprisingly young. Its earlier cousin racialism appears in a 1902 quotation and racism in one from 1903, yet the term spread widely in the West only in the 1930s, when it was used to describe Nazism's treatment of race as a natural political unit.
Racism is the belief that human groups have different behavioural traits tied to inherited attributes and can be ranked as superior or inferior. It can also mean prejudice or hostility toward people of another ethnic background. In political systems such as apartheid, it may bring along nativism, xenophobia, segregation and supremacism. Efforts to dress it up as science, known as scientific racism, have been overwhelmingly shown to be unfounded.
Historians often describe it as a relatively modern phenomenon, developing during the age of European imperialism, reshaped by capitalism and powerfully driving the Atlantic slave trade. It underpinned segregation in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and apartheid in South Africa, and it fuelled colonial projects and the Holocaust. Indigenous peoples have long been, and still are, frequent targets.
Many nineteenth-century scientists believed humanity divided neatly into races. Today most biologists, anthropologists and sociologists reject that taxonomy in favour of more precise criteria such as geography, ethnicity or histories of marrying within a group, and genome research indicates race is not a meaningful genetic classification. Social science separates race from ethnicity, though popular usage long treated them as the same.
International law took up the issue after 1945. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948. The UN has never defined racism itself, but its 1965 convention defines racial discrimination as any distinction, exclusion or preference by race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin that impairs equal enjoyment of rights, and declares theories of racial superiority scientifically false and morally condemnable. UNESCO's 1978 declaration affirmed that all humans form a single species descended from common stock, equal in dignity and rights.
Source: Racism
