Race, Racism and Critical Thinking - Essay Example

In other words, racists always consider people from others as second class citizens. They presumed to be having some kind of privileges in this society. Race is a social construct. In other words, a person belongs to a particular race not because of his activities but because of his genetics. This paper critically analyses the dimensions of race and racism. According to Albert Jacquard racism is an intellectual disease or “madness” (De Benoist, p,12). It should be noted that majority of the racists are intellectuals and well educated.

In other words, racism occurs not because of the lack of awareness about this world or society, but because of the increasing awareness of the people. In fact majority of the uneducated people do not have racism in their minds even if they come from the elite class. That is why Albert Jacquard labelled racism as an intellectual disease or “madness”. According to Michael Billig: “The fact that a person expresses prejudicial feelings toward a particular alien group does not necessarily mean that the individual will always react with hostility to a specific member of that group” (De Benoist, p,12).

In other words, individual elements have nothing to do with the feeling of racism. For example, Obama became the president of America for the second time. He is a person from black community. The election of Obama doesn’t mean that all Americans have left their racial feelings or black community has equal status with white community in America. In short, racism is a feeling against a particular community; not against any individuals. Pierre Fougeyrollas’ argued that “The social sciences must study racism as an ensemble of observable phenomena among others and in relation to other phenomena” (De Benoist, p,12).

Sexism, stereotyping, colonialism, fascism etc are some of the terms which are similar in nature with racism. One of the peculiar aspects of these terms is the fact that most people keep these kinds of beliefs in their mind and it is difficult to observe such things. Nobody will openly declare that he is a racist, sexist, or a fascist. At the same time, their activities may reflect the elements of racism, sexism, and fascism. Therefore, racism or sexism can be studied only with the help of observable behaviours.

“Racist ideology turns into a theory forged to justify an act of aggression or to legitimate a relation of domination from which one would expect to profit” (De Benoist, p,16). Profit’s word making is the motto which encourages racists to spread their ideology. We are living in a world of commercialization. In today’s world, every action is analysed in terms of the profit and loss it made. Only profitable actions are acceptable to the society whereas actions which result in some kind of losses are avoided as much as possible.

Racial activities definitely bring more profit to the elite group even though it brings losses to the underprivileged. Therefore, racists accept racism as an acceptable phenomenon whereas underprivileged or the victims label it as a unacceptable activity. “More broadly, racism is generated from the “normalization” of a relation of domination. This idea is frequently espoused by authors who see an intimate relation between racism, colonialism, imperialism, etc” ” (De Benoist, p,16). “The doctrine of colonialism unquestionably mixes racist judgments