Understanding Racism

The aim of this site is not just to present profiles of organized hate groups, their members, the tools used to spread hate, and whatever remedies exist for redress; that is necessary but not sufficient. To stop hate, we must examine the economic, social and psychological causes of hate. This involves understanding why people are alienated, how hate groups recruit, and how to help young men and women leave hate groups and that is why we have created this website. The following is an attempt to explain "why racism".

The following pages briefly present the problems with attempts to explain racism from essentialist categories of 'race' and offers an alternative approach based on the political economy of labour migration and labour market dynamics under capitalism.

Obviously, this is a work in progress. I believe we have to rely on studies of labour migration to explain racism rather than the old cultural stereotype model as advanced by historians like Peter Ward and some post-modernist sociologists who fetishize social relations. For this we have to go to studies like Labour Migration Under Capitalism: The Puerto-Rican Experience and Robert Miles' Unfree Labour Under Capitalism.

Two studies of racism from this perspective are Racism and Domestic Workers in Canada and Racism and Farm Workers in Canada.

We plan to add more to this on-going debate and rid ourselves of the non-sense about the category of 'race' that has confused sociologists and historians for many years. This task would not be important if it were not for the impact these meaningless categories have for social activists and government leaders. E-mail your comments to info@stopracism.ca or add your comment below.