- published: 06 Dec 2015
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Racism consists of ideologies and practices that seek to justify, or cause, the unequal distribution of privileges or rights among groups that are conceptualized as racially or ethnically different. These can take the form of social actions, practices, beliefs, or political systems (e.g., apartheid) that consider different races to be ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities. It may also hold that members of different races should be treated differently. Some variants include a belief in hierarchies of worth arising from biological differences between peoples.
Among the questions of how to define racism is whether to include forms of discrimination that are unintentional, such as making assumptions about preferences or abilities of others based on racial stereotypes, whether to include symbolic or institutionalized forms of discrimination such as the circulation of ethnic stereotypes through the media, or whether to include the sociopolitical dynamics of social stratification that sometimes have a racial component. Racism can also lead to racial bias and employment discrimination.